Another frustrating stab at Turkish existentialism

I wanted to give Pamuk another shot because I had read The Museum of Innocence with such overwhelming feelings of nostalgia coupled with dislike for the main character that I really couldn’t say, when asked, whether if I liked his writing or not. The White Castle was a really quick read — I read it all in a single night — and unfortunately, I think it’s going to be my last Pamuk. It’s just too bizarre, and I think I just don’t really *get* him.

The novel takes place in 17th century Turkey, and the narrator is an Italian scholar who got captured by troops from the Ottoman Empire when he was sailing to Naples. The Pasha of the empire takes a liking to him because he has some medical knowledge and was able to solve his ailments, and he introduces him to a court scholar named Hoja, who looks exactly like the narrator. During his imprisonment, he was asked by the Pasha to convert to Islam from his Christian religion, a request that he kept refusing. While he should have been killed for pissing off the Pasha, he was instead gifted to Hoja as a slave.

Hoja, mystified by this Italian scholar’s wealth of knowledge, ordered him to teach him everything he knew and more. Soon the student and the teacher were one and the same, exchanging ideas to reach solutions. But this dynamic is strained at times by the master-slave relationship, with the narrator choosing to withhold his approval of Hoja’s knowledge if he was upset at being a slave.

I’m gonna be honest here — I’m really not sure what the point of this book was. The themes seem to be about how people can have a tenuous grasp on what their selves are, and lose a sense of their being if they are challenged. There’s also a bit of the unreliable narrator trope at play here; at the end, the reader is not sure if the narrator is Hoja or the Italian scholar.

I get all of this, but I think I just sort of lost the point of the plot. This book is very simply written, and it was easy to get through it quickly, so it’s worth a read if you have a night to spare. But I’m not sure if I am used to this sort of ambiguous, mystical-unrealism writing. It’s also a completely different voice from The Museum of Innocence, though the theme of being conflicted with your selves and your personhood is a similar strain that runs through both novels.