..:: Orhan Pamuk - The White Castle

At a moment when one despairs of there ever being a meeting of minds between the Muslim world and the West, "The White Castle," a new novel by the young Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and the first of his books to be translated into English, comes as a promising antidote.

"We were sailing from Venice to Naples when the Turkish fleet appeared," begins Mr. Pamuk's story, which has been ably translated by Victoria Holbrook from the Turkish. "Our captain, fearing punishment should he be captured, could not bring himself to give the command to whip the captives at the oars. In later years I often thought that this moment of cowardice changed my whole life."

The book is written in the form of a 16th-century confession entitled "The Quilter's Stepson." As a brief preface by a fictional scholar named Faruk Darvinoglu explains, it was discovered "in 1982 in that forgotten 'archive' attached to the governor's office in Gebze that I used to rummage through for a week each summer."

In it, the nameless Venetian narrator describes how he was captured by the Turks, shipped back to Istanbul, as the translation renders what was then Constantinople, and thrown into a prison cell. But he avoided slave work by pretending to be a doctor and curing his captors' simple ailments by consulting his books. After impressing the Turks with his courage in refusing to become a Muslim despite the threat of having his head cut off with an ax, he was given as a slave to a royal scholar named Hoja, who, to the narrator's terror and amazement, exactly resembled him.

Hoja promised that after he had learned everything the narrator had to teach him, he would make him a freedman. "'Everything' meant all that I'd learned in primary and secondary school; all the astronomy, medicine, engineering, everything that was taught in my country."

Decades went by. The narrator and Hoja taught each other so much that they both became advisers to the Sultan. Finally, as Hoja explains in the concluding chapter, the narrator went back to Italy. Or was it Hoja who went back and the narrator who stayed? It is impossible to tell. Their identities have become interchangeable.

The surface message of this is obvious. As Hoja reports the sultan asking: "Was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other's place?"

But the appeal of "The White Castle" lies deeper. It resides in the odd marriage of Western rationalism and Eastern religious faith that occurs, for example, when the narrator tricks the sultan into taking sanitary precautions against a plague that is sweeping Istanbul: "His mind accepted the idea that the plague was like a devil trying to deceive him by taking on human form; he decided not to allow strangers into the palace; comings and goings were kept under strict supervision."

The appeal also resides in the irony that when the narrator had taught Hoja all he knew about fireworks, engineering and mathematics, both men were assigned by the sultan to design the ultimate war machine, a thing of wheels and levers that men called "freak, insect, satan, turtle archer, walking tower, iron heap, red rooster, kettle on wheels, giant, cyclops, monster, swine, gypsy, blue-eyed weirdie" that ended up mired in a swamp when the sultan's army tried unsuccessfully to storm the white castle in Doppio in the Carpathian Mountains.

And beyond all messages and ironies lies the substance of the novel: the narrator's relation to Hoja, which begins in subservience, proceeds through a rivalry demanding the most painful introspection, and ends in brotherly love.

That unattainable castle suggests Kafka, of course. The echoing word patterns recall Nabokov. The interplay of science and fantasy makes one think of Italo Calvino. But Orhan Pamuk — who has published four previous novels in Turkish, has traveled widely throughout Europe and the United States and has been a visiting fellow in the writing program at the University of Iowa — is his own man, too.

Near the end of "The White Castle" an actual 17th-century travel writer named Evliya Chelebi visits Hoja (or is it the narrator?), having heard of him from the narrator (or is it Hoja?). Upon learning that the author (whoever he may be) is writing the book we have just read, he advises him to "search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves!" He continues: "To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy."

As the text reports, Evliya "was so pleased with what I had told him that he decided to give me pleasure too, and told me about the tightrope walkers disappearing into the skies of Acre, the woman of Konya who gave birth to an elephant, the blue-winged bulls by the shores of the Nile, pink cats, the clock tower of Vienna, the false front teeth he'd had made there and which he now displayed in a grin, the talking cave on the beach of the Sea of Azov, the red ants of America."

But these strange wonders do not bring promised joy. "For some reason these stories prompted a strange melancholy, I felt like crying. The red glow of the setting sun flooded my room. When Evliya asked if I, too, had amazing tales like these, I thought I'd really surprise him and invited him and his servants to stay the night: I had a story that would delight him, about two men who had exchanged lives."

So appropriately ends a happily exotic book about the pain of self-examination. And so for the length of a novel there occurs a transcendent blending between what Mr. Pamuk apparently sees as the too inner-directed West and the too outer-directed Middle East. For an instant, the twain meet.