Warning: you have to relax to read this book, just let go and let it take you where it wants. This is a novel on identity: the plot really does not matter (is this the defining feature of good literature?), the crucial point is how two individuals actually become one, to the point that we no longer know ourselves who is whom. Is the Italian slave really taking the place of his "hoja" (i.e. master, according to Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books), are they really swapping lives as previousl...

If you want To know the differences between a Western mind and an Ottoman mind read this bookMaybe this is the reason of our backwardness in east

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4dQ...Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017It'll make you feel wonderfully sinister. A dreamy, absorbing novel that's very dense but immensely captivating - on par with the weirdest fiction of Calvino, Borges or Hoffmann.

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk - Right at the outset we're given an Arabian Nights story within a story: a Faruk Darvinoglu finds a manuscript in 1982, in a forgotten archive attached to a governor's office in Gebze, a city thirty miles southeast of Istanbul. The manuscript carries the title The Quilter's Stepson and the margins and blank pages are filled with drawings in a childish hand of men and women with tiny heads dressed in costumes with buttons. Faruk tells us some events described in t...

i didn't like it, but may be because i expected a lot from it as a historical novel...it was boring for me, i leave it several times,but finally i finished it...

This book starts with a foreword from a (made-up) finder who found the story in an archive - and who gives the book its 'dedication to-'.... I kind of like books that start like this. Anyway, the story seems to be partly fact, partly fiction, a story of 1600s Istanbul where two similar-looking men form a strange friendship. The author is the one half of this, remaining nameless throughout, an Italian who was captured and sold to slavery by pirates, finally owned by Hoca (a title, no real name fo...

"The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination." - said the annotation. But I don't see The White Castle as a triumph. It's good but nothing more. Pamuk tells us a story about a slave who inspite all diffuculties and troubles took his place in the turkish society of masters and a master who seemed to be insane and genious at the same time. They are similar like brothers and their mind had become similar, too. Knowledge of the Slave became a part of Hoja. Hoj...

I'll be honest, I was pretty bored and disappointed.

A Short StartI started reading this novel, because it was Pamuk's shortest and although I liked the subject matter of his other novels, I was worried I might bite off more than I could chew (I am the sort of person who must finish a book once I've started it, even if I hate it). So this was a taster for me.From A to B Inevitably I think it is fair to say that what happens at the end is inevitable. His craftsmanship lies in how he achieves it. There is a moment towards the end of the book when th...

Well, this was unexpected. And, to be honest, I had no valid argument to expect what I expected, but still… Somehow I thought this would be a plot-based story or a novella focusing on a particular, specific event. Maybe the beginning just slightly reminded me of “Devil’s Yard” (I. Andrić). In the 17th century, after a pirate raid, a young Venetian intellectual is brought to Istanbul as a prisoner and begins living in a Hoca’s home shortly after that. The nature of his captivity though is not to

Are we really so different from one another? Why am I not the magnificent white castle that sits on top of the hill but a rusty, creaking and nonsensical monstrosity wrought in hopes of "proving things to them", stuck in mud and sinking to its death with poor, accidental participants in it? Why can't I be you? If I knew who you were, where you come from and what you thought of while eating lunch with your family on an idle summer day of your youth? Are there really things to be found inside ones...

4 starsWhat a mind-bending, intellectually satisfying read! The White Castle is set in a semi-historical, semi-mythical 17th-century Istanbul, and opens with the unnamed narrator telling us how he came to live there. When he was a young man, the narrator’s ship is captured by a Turkish fleet. During his captivity in prison, he meets a man who looks exactly like him - his doppelgänger - and this man, known only as Hoja or ‘master’, would later purchase him as his slave. Hoja contemptuously demand...

Pamuk's first book I read. Very enthusiastic about discovering this writer of whom the critics speak positively.I liked the beginning of the novel, which reminded me of the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, but afterwards, the idea of giving up while reading haunted me as the idea of committing suicide haunts a prisoner. Finally, however, I said to myself (thinking of this Rabelaisian metaphor that a reader attaches to a book like a dog with a bone for this strand of marrow) that I must finish...

Pamuk’s talent for storytelling is definitely unquestionable. Well, OK, you can disagree, I don’t care. I loved the setting; it was basically the main criteria for choosing the book (I’d probably need to mention the reader-friendly length, as well). I loved the plot (the double / the identical twin, the capacity of exchanging not only identities, but also memories, ideas and beliefs), the framing device, the (unreliable) 1st person narrative, the mind games and the twisted relationship / brutal

It is almost impossible to talk about this book without revealing its ending (or at least what one might consider to be its ending). This strange work purports to be a 17th century manuscript found by one Faruk Darvinoglu in 1982. We find that in the manuscript we are about to read, '... some events described in the story bore little resemblance to fact', although the 'truth' of the general knowledge of the period seemed to be accurate (p.2). On page 3 Faruk reveals that a professor he had consu...

"He did not want to think about how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities if their books and their stories were always about this"I don't know how to write a review for such a book!I'm sure it deserves more than 3 stars cause it's a unique and one of a kind story but I haven't enjoyed it that muchThe ending was vague as were the characterssometimes I thought the character Hoja was mentally disturbed and sometimes I thought he was a genius. as f...

I was surprised at how easy and fast this was to read. Until I got to the end, I mean. Then I felt that I should start over and read it again, because I was sure I missed something. You tricked me, Mr.Pamuk! And I liked it!The best part about this book was the exploration of identity. What does it mean, when I say who I am? What makes me me and not someone else? Not something I want to think about all the time, but excellent thoughts to spin around in the early hours of the morning.Slightly besi...

Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for literature and is supposed to be the premier man of letters in contemporary Turkey. However, I noted that more than one person on my friends' list on Goodreads was less than enthused with his books. Thus, instead of reading his more famous My Name is Red or Snow, I deliberately chose the slimmest volume on the shelf for my introduction--The White Castle--a mere 161 pages--yet this couldn't hold me even that far.Set in seventeenth century Turkey, it's the f...

Beyaz Kale = The White Castle, Orhan PamukThe story begins with a frame tale in the form of a preface written by historian Faruk Darvinoglu (a character referenced in Pamuk's previous book, Silent House) between 1984 and 1985, according to the fictional dedication to the character's late sister at the beginning of the frame tale. Faruk recalls finding the story that follows in a storage room while looking through an archive in the governor's office in Gebze, among old bureaucratic papers. He tak...

What defines each of us? What makes us lazy? Ambitious? Do good? Fall prey to evil? Perhaps we can only see ourselves in others? A mirror of our inner realities.Orhan Pamuk sets up a story within a story. Amforgotten book, “The Quilter’s Stepson” tells the tale of two men, a Venetian and a Turk in the 17th century Ottoman Empire. We are never told the name of the Venetian but we learn of his background: a young scholar, engaged to be married who is captured and sold into slavery in Istanbul. His...