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Written by 
- Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- On Sale: March 31, 1998
- Price: $14.00
- ISBN: 978-0-375-70161-0 (0-375-70161-3)
about this book
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. 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.
"[Orhan Pamuk] has earned the right to comparisons with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, both of whom preside over this novel like beneficent angels.... a storyteller with as much gumption and narrative zip as Scheherazade."
--New York Times Book Review
