Tuesday, August 16, 2005
The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk
To sum this in one line.. mmm…well this winner of the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction is succinct and a little abstract. Loved the first person narrative and beginning to think it’s a style of Pamuk. I sure hope it is.
The manuscript is found by one Faruk Darvinoglu, supposed to be a character from another of Pamuk's novels. Here narrator, an Italian, starts to tell his tale where he is captured and sold as a slave in Turkey. He is sold to a Hoja and sees an immense likeness in his master. His likeness to his master soon envelopes into a relationship where they become two people to one identity.
The story lacks a bit in depth or may be I just didn't understand it and need to go back to it. The bit about the weapon and the white castle is still not very clear. The weapon, to me, seemed more like a mind game and some contraption that the author via Hoja and the Pasha and the narrator tried to build from their thoughts.
Can there really be this mean machine (which from description is certainly not lean), takes up more space than necessary, does not help and on the contrary slows down the entire quest for victory. That sounds like some of my thoughts or even a particularly vile mind game…
The thirst of knowledge drives Hoja and the slave to strange habits of confessing sins and avoiding looking in a mirror. The sins had to be gory, grotesque and lurid – fictional in order to make them palatable. When ever Hoja starts to write about why he is the way he is, he begins instead to write about how ‘they’ are foolish and commit the same sins.
This perhaps required me to know a little more about the time book has been set in. As opposed to My Name is Red, where despite the timeliness of the story, no background was per se needed as the story wove it in and I didn’t think this story does the same.
The end of the book does not quite go with the book. On one level the narrator constantly wants to free himself and return to his country, his people and start living his life as he should have led it, despite time having moved on. While on another level he gives all that up so his Hoja can continue his search of knowledge about other people, science and other affiliated subjects.
He goes onto become something he nearly gave up his life to not become. So why now? That’s what I think bothers me the most.. that his (the narrator’s) motives are not very clear. At one point he wants to impress with his knowledge, at another, hide because of it and another, lives a life of another for the same knowledge.
Of course ,the whole mockery of making predictions relying on astronomy I so totally loved. Astronomy is definitely as existing science but their predictions are as much a science as trying to estimate a success rate for getting Delhi autorickshaws to use their meters. Blah! One more sign that don’t open all those sites and check prediction for the day.
This was apparently the first book that got translated and definitely will encourage the reader to read more of the same author.
The manuscript is found by one Faruk Darvinoglu, supposed to be a character from another of Pamuk's novels. Here narrator, an Italian, starts to tell his tale where he is captured and sold as a slave in Turkey. He is sold to a Hoja and sees an immense likeness in his master. His likeness to his master soon envelopes into a relationship where they become two people to one identity.
The story lacks a bit in depth or may be I just didn't understand it and need to go back to it. The bit about the weapon and the white castle is still not very clear. The weapon, to me, seemed more like a mind game and some contraption that the author via Hoja and the Pasha and the narrator tried to build from their thoughts.
Can there really be this mean machine (which from description is certainly not lean), takes up more space than necessary, does not help and on the contrary slows down the entire quest for victory. That sounds like some of my thoughts or even a particularly vile mind game…
The thirst of knowledge drives Hoja and the slave to strange habits of confessing sins and avoiding looking in a mirror. The sins had to be gory, grotesque and lurid – fictional in order to make them palatable. When ever Hoja starts to write about why he is the way he is, he begins instead to write about how ‘they’ are foolish and commit the same sins.
This perhaps required me to know a little more about the time book has been set in. As opposed to My Name is Red, where despite the timeliness of the story, no background was per se needed as the story wove it in and I didn’t think this story does the same.
The end of the book does not quite go with the book. On one level the narrator constantly wants to free himself and return to his country, his people and start living his life as he should have led it, despite time having moved on. While on another level he gives all that up so his Hoja can continue his search of knowledge about other people, science and other affiliated subjects.
He goes onto become something he nearly gave up his life to not become. So why now? That’s what I think bothers me the most.. that his (the narrator’s) motives are not very clear. At one point he wants to impress with his knowledge, at another, hide because of it and another, lives a life of another for the same knowledge.
Of course ,the whole mockery of making predictions relying on astronomy I so totally loved. Astronomy is definitely as existing science but their predictions are as much a science as trying to estimate a success rate for getting Delhi autorickshaws to use their meters. Blah! One more sign that don’t open all those sites and check prediction for the day.
This was apparently the first book that got translated and definitely will encourage the reader to read more of the same author.
