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Introduction: Orhan Pumuk's The White Castle
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19290 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1991 |
386 Words |
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This month's featured book, The White Castle, provides readers an opportunity to become acquainted with the work of Orhan Pamuk, one of Turkey's most celebrated and widely read novelists and a rising star on the international literary horizon.
Born and educated in Istanbul, Pamuk, thirty-eight, has been writing since his teens; his first novel was published in 1978. Over the past ten years his work has emerged from relative obscurity to win international acclaim. Each of his novels combines his talents as a consummate storyteller with his philosophical genius. He tries to assimilate everything he knows from his experience and education in the East and the West to create the quintessential novel. Pamuk is now trying to go beyond the influences of the Western model to create, as Talat Halman points out, an "authentic, original novelistic art--a new synthesis."
The excerpt of The White Castle shows the drama generated between a Venetian scholar (who is never named) and the Turk (called Hoja, or teacher) who is his exact double, a doppelganger. They take turns taking on the identity of the other until finally they exchange identities completely. Combining their Eastern and Western resources to build the "ultimate war machine," they set out to capture the impregnable white castle, which represents at once Western superiority, literary imagination, and a self-realized personality. Their attempt is doomed to failure. These two characters are seldom entirely Eastern or Western; instead, Pamuk tries to show that they are individuals who are able to create themselves and the world they live in and who thus need not be limited by the reality imposed on
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