I found this book rather boring. ( )

An intelligent but easy to read book. It doesn't lay out the message right in front of you but instead leaves you to decide what you take away from the book. Deals with identity and asks the age old question "What am I?". Beautiful and fascinating, it is one of Orhan Pamuk's best works. ( )

http://bibliotheca.skynetblogs.be/pos... ( )

A strangely compelling story. I don't know how to express what I felt as i read the book, but I do highly recommend it. This book will make you think. ( )

Judging from the jacket copy, The White Castle is a thrilling tale of a young Venetian scholar kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Ottoman Empire. This description is misleading. Rather than a tale of high adventure and self-discovery, the book is an extremely cerebral meditation on the meaning of cruelty, sin and identity. The story takes off when the nameless narrator is given to a Turkish scholar desperate to learn Western science. By strange coincidence, the master and slave look almost identical to one another. The two rapidly develop a relationship where they alternately worship and torture each other. Both torture themselves by trying to win the favor of a childish, manipulative sultan.

This is obviously a deeply complex work, but I never quite figured out what the novel wanted to tell me. Although I sometimes felt absorbed by the psychological drama, finishing this book required a lot of effort and I doubt I would have succeeded if I hadn't been contemplating teaching it to my world literature class. In my opinion, all writers have a responsibility to make their works engaging and this is where Pamuk fails. There is no dialogue, no descriptions of the no-doubt-fabulous Turkish scenery, not even a sentence that inspired me with its beauty. The ideas are good, but it doesn't have the full package. Three stars. ( )