The White Castle - Softcover

Orhan Pamuk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571164668 ISBN 13: 9780571164660

Publisher: Faber Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

Winner of the 1990 "Independent" Award for foreign fiction, this book tells the story of a young Italian scholar who is captured by pirates. Put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, he is bought by a Turkish servant, eager to learn about scientific and intellectual advances in the West.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja--"master"--a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.

About the Author

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 into a family of engineers. He was educated in Istanbul at an American school. He dropped out of his architecture course to become a full-time writer and obtained a degree in journalism from Istanbul University. Since 1982, when his first novel was published to great acclaim, Pamuk has been one of Turkey's most successful authors. After three years in the USA, including a stint as visiting fellow at the University of Iowa, he returned to Istanbul, where he lives with his wife and daughter. In 1995 Pamuk was among a group of authors tried for criticising the Turkish regime's treatment of the Kurds in a book of essays exercising the freedom of speech.He is the author of six novels. The White Castle won the 1990 Independent Award for Foreign Fiction, and the publication of The New Life caused a sensation in his native land, becoming the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. My Name is Red, publi

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571164668
• ISBN 13: 9780571164660
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176