Life in different mirrors - The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

The narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s first book is a young Italian scholar who is captured by Turkish pirates. At Constantinople he is sold at auction, eventually passing into the service of a man who looks identical to him and is as eager to gain the sultan’s ear as he is to learn the ways of the West. The two men embark on an intense journey of self-examination, vacillating between equal forces of attraction and repulsion. Pamuk explores the complexities of these emotions in sentences which are equally nuanced and are rich with detail. The White Castle anticipates the themes of cultural identity and doubleness offered by the host of narrators in My Name is Red. That book’s detective story is replaced here with the story court intrigue, and, with only two main characters, this slimmer novel has a more intense focus on individual identity.