More praise for The White Castle:
'The White Castle is brilliant not for its evocation of the time, but for its investigation of the myth of the individual and because Pamuk packages such meditations in such a simple story.' Guardian
'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 innerdirected West and the too outer-directed Middle East. For an instant, the twain meet.' New York Times
'Orhan Pamuk's brilliant novel about foreign influences ... gives us a cool and elegantly jaundiced look at the results of cultural fusion. There are echoes of Calvino, but the writer he is closest to in technique and outlook is Kazuo Ishiguro.' Independent
To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person – what else is this but the birth of great passion?
Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y.K. Karaosmano?lu