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Being Oneself and Another |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / FEATURED BOOK: Orhan Pumuk's The White Castle |
| Author: Guneli Gun |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 6,024 Words, 35,850 Characters |
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The White Castle is a fake--in the best postmodernist sense. Ostensibly set in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century, Orhan Pamuk's third and only book available in English translation pretends to be a historical novel. Yet an acquaintance with Pamuk's other work clues the wary reader that this book is really a postmodernist treatise, replete not only with a preface by a character from a previous novel but with a dedication to the character's fictional dead sister. We know we're being taken for a ride, being conducted, as it were, by an unreliable narrator, that tricky tour guide so well employed by the postmodern fiction writers.
The character, a fat and crapulous professor of history (obviously an alter ego of the writer, who appears to be thin and sober), claims to hav...
. . .
...olbrook's translation transforms the book into the postmodernist artifact that the writer intended it to be and can now proudly present to the world. In the act of the translation, the book integrates with its double, intimately familiar and also deeply alien. So how Turkish is it? Very. Or not very. "What is reading but slowly acquiring someone else's memory bank?" It is to become another.
(806 of 35,850 characters)
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