White Castle

In The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk proffers a dazzling work of historical and philosophical fiction, set amid the scholarship and savagery of seventeenth-century Constantinople. When a young Italian scholar is taken prisoner while sailing from Venice to Naples, he becomes the slave and tutor of a Turkish scholar called 'Hoja' -- 'master' -- who is his exact double. At first he instructs his master in Western science, but Hoja wants to know more. In particular he wants to know if, given knowledge of each other's intimate secrets, they could exchange identifies. The White Castle is a triumph of the imagination, as colorful and intricately patterned as a Turkish prayer rug.