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11 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pamuk's First Novel is a Disappointment, 4 May 2005
Like many others in my book group, I had been looking forward to finally reading something by Pamuk. And like most of my book group, I was fairly disappointed by this short early novel from him. Originally published in Turkey in 1985, the story is prefaced by an introduction in which one Faruk Darvinoglu purports to have discovered the manuscript in a dusty archive. He then goes on to explain that parts of the story can be historically corroborated, but much of it can't. This should immediately alert the reader not to take everything in the book as it comes. Even more so if the reader knows that Darvinoglu is the protagonist of Pamuk's earlier book The House of Silence. Such intertextual tricks immediately bring to mind the works of Calvino, Borges, and their ilk.The basic plot is very straightforward: in the mid 17th-century, a young Venetian gentleman is captured by Turkish raiders and sold into slavery to an aspiring Turkish scholar who happens to look just like him. The two men then spend the next few decades cloistered together, engaged in various psuedo-intellectual investigations of astronomy, biology, engineering, and so on. These bring them to the attention of the Sultan (based on Mehmet IV), whose patronage waxes and wanes, culminating in a lengthy attempt to construct a powerful war machine. Along the way, their claustrophobic relationship swings back and forth, and is interrupted by an outbreak of the plague, whose outcome they are tasked with predicting. The book concludes with a brief section which will challenge the reader's assumptions and calls into question everything that comes before it. Namely, are there two characters or are they just manifestations of two aspects of a single person? This all unfolds at a glacial pace, and the two "characters" are mere ciphers. Their clashing of wills and ideas take up page after page, but the reader is always told about the conflict rather than shown it, and this makes for disengaging reading. Pamuk seems much less interested in storytelling or characters than in grand themes such as the nature of identity, the collision of cultures, and the very nature of reality. But none of these are addressed in a way that is particularly fresh or interesting. The tension between East and West is handled in a fairly superficial manner, as the Turkish master is obsessed with Western advances in science and technology, while the Sultan has a credulous appetite for tall tales and soothsayers. This all comes across as a rather ambivalent satire of the fluidity of Turkish national character. In the end, this is not a particularly good introduction to major modern writer whom many have compared to Eco, Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and Kundera. However, readers who enjoy highly ambiguous works about self-identity with unreliable narrators may find this a satisfying read.
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