White Castle (14 page)
Authors: Orhan Pamuk
1984–85
*
Evliya Chelebi (
c
. 1611–82) is the author of the renowned
Book of Travels (Seyahatname) – Trans
.
About the Translator
Victoria Holbrook lived in Istanbul for five years and is currently Assistant Professor of Turkish Literature at Ohio State University.
By Orhan Pamuk
Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari
(1982)
The Silent House
(1983)
The White Castle
(1985)
The Black Book
(1990)
The New Life
(1994)
My Name is Red
(1998)
Snow
(2002)
Istanbul
(2003)
My Father’s Suitcase
(2006)
Other Colors
(2007)
The Museum of Innocence
(2009)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
(2010)
Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in the wealthy Nisantasi district of Istanbul. His experience growing up in a large family is reflected in his novels
The Black Book
and
Cevdet Bey and His Sons
, as well as in his memoir
Istanbul
. After graduating from American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, but left after three years to pursue writing. He completed a degree in Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976, but decided instead to become a full-time novelist. At 23, while living at home, he completed his first novel, and it was published seven years later in 1982.
Cevdet Bey and His Sons
was awarded the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes.
In 1985, the publication of
The White Castle
, a book that explores the relationship between a young Italian scholar taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire, and his master, brought Pamuk the beginnings of international fame. He traveled to the United States, and from 1985 to 1988 became a visiting scholar at Columbia University. While in New York, he wrote most of his next novel,
The Black Book
. In 1990,
The White Castle
won the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction, and the following year the French translation of Pamuk’s second novel,
The Silent House
, won the Prix de la Découverte Européene. Pamuk’s daughter Rüya was born in 1991, in Istanbul.
The New Life
, published in 1994, became an extremely popular novel in Turkey. Four years later,
My Name is Red
was published, winning the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Snow
, which the author described as a more “political” novel about the tensions between different racial and political groups in Kars, Turkey, was published in 2002. It was selected as one of the best 100 books of 2004 by
The New York Times
, and in 2005, it was awarded Le Prix Médicis Étranger for the best foreign novel published in France that year. The following year,
Snow
also received Le Prix Méditerranée Étranger.
In addition to
Istanbul
, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction was published in the collection
Other Colors
, touching on topics including his personal library, travel, childhood, solitude, and the moments that have contributed to his fiction. His lyrical, witty and provocative articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers internationally, including
The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, La Repubblica, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), El Pais
, and
Le Monde
.
Pamuk’s most recent novel,
The Museum of Innocence
, became an instant bestseller upon its release in Turkey in January 2008, and was published internationally thereafter.
Pamuk may be best known for receiving the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the second youngest person ever to be awarded the Prize.
TIME
magazine also chose him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006. He holds honorary doctorates from universities including Yale University, the Free University of Berlin, Madrid University, and Georgetown University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. He was the 2009 Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University, and Harvard University Press will publish the Norton Lectures,
The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist
, in November 2010. Pamuk is currently the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and lives in Istanbul.
As one of Turkey’s most prominent writers, his books have been translated into more than 50 languages.
A young Italian scholar on a sea-borne journey from Venice to Naples is captured by Turkish pirates, who sell him into slavery. He is rescued from a foul Istanbul dungeon by a pasha, who believes him a healer, and bound to Hoja, a servant who wants nothing more than to learn the Western sciences of astronomy, medicine, and engineering. As a peculiarly intimate relationship grows between the two, their striking resemblance to each other deepens, with unexpected results. Caught in a friendship-
cum
-rivalry that becomes ever more intense, they labor on one marvelous invention after another, elevating Hoja to the rank of Imperial Astrologer. In their final grand project together, they build a fantastic war machine for the sultan – one which will surely secure their immortality.
A marvelous mirror narrative of East and West looking at each other in fear and wonder,
The White Castle
has been justly compared to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Vladimir Nabokov. Combining the rich tapestry of the streets of 17
th
century Constantinople and the Italian high seas with the intrigue of science and mysticism, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the heart of several unsettling mysteries.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1998
Translation copyright © 1990 by Victoria Holbrook
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Turkish as
Beyaz Kale
by Gan Yayin Lari Ltd. Original Turkish text © 1985 by Orhan Pamuk. This translation originally published in hardcover in Great Britain in 1990 by Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, and subsequently in the United States in 1991 by George Braziller, Inc., New York.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74404-3