The White Castle. Translated by Victoria Holbrook.

PAMUK, Orhan.

ISBN 10: 0807612642 / ISBN 13: 9780807612644

Published by George Braziller, New York, 1991

About this Item

First U.S. edition / First printing. Uncorrected proof. Signed by the Nobel laureate author. White printed wrappers. 161 pages. Very fine. A beautiful copy and rare signed. Note: This is the uncorrected proof and should not be confused with the hardcover edition. Very few proofs were produced which makes this a highly desirable collector's item. Pamuk was the 2006 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Seller Inventory # 11663

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The White Castle. Translated by Victoria Holbrook.
• Publisher: George Braziller, New York
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807612642
• ISBN 13: 9780807612644
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Signed Books
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

The narrator looks back on his life as imperial astrologer for a Turkish sultan

Reviews

One of Turkey's foremost novelists explores the ambivalent relationship between master and slave in this elegant, postmodernist twist on the theme of the doppelganger. During the 17th century, a young Italian is captured by the Turkish fleet and brought to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of an erudite man who could pass for his twin. The Hoja , or master, is convinced that the Italian youth's European education is superior to his own and he becomes the young man's pupil. Once the Hoja perceives the superficiality of the young man's knowledge, however, he insists that the slave tell him more, demanding details of his double's upbringing. When this, too, becomes tiresome, the slave confesses to real and imagined sins for which he is beaten. As their relationship changes over the years, with each alternating domination, the author deftly plays the mirror-image characters against each other. To aid the Ottoman sultan in his war against the Poles, the two develop a fantastical war machine. Its disastrous failure in battle proves their undoing. The reader is left guessing at the ultimate fate of the Hoya and the slave, while at the same time admiring Pamuk's skillfully constructed paradoxes.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The third novel by the well-known Turkish writer recounts the life of a young Italian Christian taken captive at sea by the Ottoman Turks in the 17th century. Through his intelligence he is treated quite favorably as a slave and spends his days in Istanbul doing research for the Pasha and young Sultan under the sponsorship of a learned man, whom he hauntingly resembles. A slow, unmoving book that lacks substance or well-developed characters, it ironically concludes in the closing chapters with the author's comment, "I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside."-- Paula I. Nielson, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.