Beyaz Kale (The White Castle)

Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.

This piece is based on the publisher's description of the book, plot summaries and published reviews. I do not pass judgment on how it is written at the level of the sentence or on how its style flows. Instead I write about what the book builds, how it builds it, and which questions it opens up in me.

What the book is, who wrote it

Beyaz Kale (The White Castle) came out in 1985. It is Orhan Pamuk's third novel: before it came Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons) in 1982 and Sessiz Ev (Silent House) in 1983. Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952, studied architecture for three years and then left, graduated from the institute of journalism in 1976, and began writing regularly in 1974. In 2006 he became the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation the Academy spoke of how, in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, he discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.

The book's international journey began with Victoria Holbrook's translation. Its English edition was published in 1990 by Carcanet (UK) and Braziller (US), and that same year the book won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The New York Times Book Review wrote in 1991: "A new star has risen in the east." Pamuk's worldwide recognition grew with his later novels, but this was the book that opened the door.

Its Turkish editions today appear on sale under the imprints of Yapı Kredi Yayınları and İletişim. Depending on the edition, the page count varies between 150 and 200. So it is a slim novel that can be finished in one or two sittings.

The starting idea

What happens if a narrator becomes the slave of someone who looks exactly like him? The book opens with this question, but it enlarges the question through ready-made pairs such as East and West, science and superstition, master and slave. The sentence in the publisher's description sums up the matter well: the story reaches toward the question "Why am I who I am?" and as it goes on, the shadows trade places.

The novel also has a frame. The preface is written by a character we know from Sessiz Ev, the historian Faruk Darvinoğlu. He found a manuscript in a storeroom of the governor's building in Gebze, tried to trace its author, and in the end decided to publish it. He also notes that the title was given by the publisher. So the text in our hands is a fictional manuscript found by a fictional character. It is important to know this from the start, because it leaves no reason at all to read the book as a historical account.

Inside the book: from the preface to the castle

The narrator is an Italian who is never named. The Ottoman fleet captures his ship on its way from Venice to Naples, and he is brought to Istanbul as a slave. According to the description, he is someone who believes he understands astronomy, physics and painting. To survive, he says he is a physician, eases a pasha's shortness of breath with the basic anatomy he knows, and gains a privilege this way.

The pasha introduces him to Hoca. Hoca is an Ottoman with an interest in science, and his face is almost identical to the narrator's. The first job the two take on is preparing a fireworks display for the wedding of the pasha's son. The display is a success, but the real story begins after it. The pasha offers the slave his freedom in exchange for changing his religion. The narrator refuses, even goes through a mock execution, and in the end is given to Hoca.

The scene the description sketches gives, I think, the mood of the book: in a dark and empty house overlooking the Golden Horn, two men sit at the two ends of a table and try to get to know each other. Hoca humiliates the slave, crushes him by frightening him with the plague, but at the same time wants to learn from him. He asks the slave for his life story and tells him his own story too. The aim is to find out why each of them is who he is.

Here the relationship between the two men takes an interesting turn. At first the power flows in one direction: Hoca is the master, the narrator the slave. But Hoca cannot stop learning, and the narrator cannot stop teaching. Hoca's talent for imitation, according to the summaries I read, is good enough to make the narrator uneasy. As the two men realize they could take each other's place, the relationship breaks down. I think the book's tension comes from here: the question of who controls whom turns into the question of who is whose shadow.

The plague ravages Istanbul. Meanwhile Hoca tries to catch the attention of the Child Sultan and to rise to the post of chief court astrologer. The fuel for this rise is the narrator's knowledge. Once Hoca has risen, the two of them spend six years building an enormous iron weapon for the Sultan.

The weapon is tested in the siege of a castle in Poland. The castle is the white castle that gives the novel its name. The weapon does not work, reinforcements arrive, Hoca disappears. The narrator hides. As far as I understand from the summaries, the book goes through an interesting shift here: from this moment on, who the "he" in the text is, and which of them flees to which country, becomes blurred.

In the last chapter the narrator is in his seventies, wealthy and married. The traveler Evliya Çelebi visits him and wants to hear about Italy. It is said that this conversation is also what pushes the narrator to write his own story. This is also what ends the book: the narrator of the story is unreliable, and whether the events really happened and who the narrator is remain open.

Its strength: twinship, but the question asked is not twinship

The idea of two people with the same face is an old literary game. If it were me, I would read Beyaz Kale for the question it places on top of this old game. When Hoca and the slave resemble each other physically, the matter stops being "who can take whose place" and turns into the question "what makes a person that person." The name, the language, the religion, the knowledge, the memories?

There is also the question of knowledge. According to the theme summaries I read, the book contrasts the narrator's contemporary and scientifically sound knowledge with Hoca's knowledge, which passes through the filter of translation and dogma. The heliocentric and geocentric models of the universe are the symbol of this difference. The narrator uses what he knows to help, Hoca for ambition. In this way a distinction remains beneath the two men's likeness, and likeness alone is not enough.

The failure of the weapon also looks like an important move: the Ottomans falling behind their age is not stated as a separate thesis, it is lived in a scene at the novel's climax. This is the first strong form of an issue that returns in Pamuk's later books as well.

What could be weak

I see three risks in this book. Only someone who reads it can say to what extent they come true.

The first is that the construction is too schematic. East and West, master and slave, twin and twin. A book built this neatly may sometimes not get beyond showing the rules of the game. The line between a well-written novel of ideas and a novel that merely carries its idea is thin.

The second is not trusting the narrator. A fictional historian setting up the frame, the manuscript being unreliable and the ending being left open can be richness for one reader and a tiring game for another. Even though I like books of this kind, I understand the reader who comes out of such a game saying "so what, what happened in the end."

The third is that what we take for history is fiction. Ottoman Istanbul, the plague, the Sultan, the palace: all of it is the scenery of a real period, but the novel is not out to document that period. Someone who reads it expecting historical accuracy will be disappointed.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the reader who thinks hard about questions of identity. It is also suitable for someone who reads a book to think about ideas and is looking for a short, dense novel.

For a reader who loved Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence) and wants to look at an older, tighter and shorter book by Pamuk, it can be a good bridge. The two are very different: one lives inside a long, repetitive and emotional obsession, the other is slim, playful and driven by ideas.

It is not for someone looking for lots of events, a fast pace and a simple love story. And for the reader who does not enjoy books where who is who stays blurred, it takes patience.

Its place on the shelf

I think of this book side by side with three books on the site.

The same author as Masumiyet Müzesi, at a very different distance. In the Masumiyet Müzesi review I wrote that a narrator can be the most mistaken source about himself. In Beyaz Kale the problem lies a little deeper: the narrator is not only mistaken about himself, he is not even sure who he is.

It has a kinship with Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected): there too, who a man is does not fit into a single answer, and each of the people who knew him tells a different Selim. Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), on the other hand, tells of a life closed up in a notebook, one that looks faded from the outside. Both show that the way a person appears in other people's eyes and the way they know themselves are not the same thing.

There is also a distant kinship with Solaris: there too, a person is forced to weigh again what they know about themselves in the face of something else.

ADHD and identity: the question that stayed with me

Tying this book to ADHD may be out of place, but as someone who was diagnosed at 22, I know why I care about this question. A diagnosis leads a person to reread the story they tell about themselves. A life read for years as "lazy," "messy," "wasting her talent" can be read again within another frame. I described this rereading in the article on how a diagnosis changes your life. The masking article, too, is about the distance between the self a person shows others and the self they know.

Beyaz Kale does not carry this question over to ADHD, but it starts from the same ground: how much of what I call "I" belongs to me, and how much of it is a mold that could stand in for someone else? I wrote about the exhaustion that comes when we borrow our yardsticks in the diary entry on the measures of self-worth. The idea of two twins who can take each other's place feels to me like an extreme form of that piece.

How I would read it

First of all, I would not skip the preface. The preface is one of the book's games, and it sets how you will read what follows. Then I would read the chapters not quickly, but as if each one were asking a question about identity. The Turkish reader has the original text in hand; the reader in English relies on Holbrook's translation. Since the book also takes as its subject the way translation filters knowledge, I think this distinction is worth keeping in mind while reading. And one short suggestion: going back to the preface after finishing makes it easier to see what the frame does.

Closing

I would read this slim novel not as a story but as a question, and I would not expect its answer. Pamuk shows that identity is not made only of things that look solid, like name, language and religion, and then leaves nothing in their place. I think this leaving-nothing is both the book's strongest and its riskiest side. The books truly worth rereading are the ones that do not give the answer, and this one looks like one of them.