The White Castle - Orhan Pamuk
I'm reading all of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and International Booker Prize winners in order. Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle won the inaugural Independent Foreign Fiction Prize on 1990.
Orhan Pamuk is one of those authors I've been aware of for many years and have always intended to read but have never got around to, so I went into this with high hopes. And initially I really liked it - the framing device of this being a discovered manuscript of unknown provenance is something I really love, and the early chapters really sucked me into the world and made me excited to spend time with our anonymouse narrator.
Unfortunately the magic soon wore off. That's not to say that I disliked the book, but I found the bulk of it to be a bit of a slog. Nothing much happens and we never really get to know all that much about our narrator. I found that there was very little to hold my interest, and if I had to pick one word to describe the bulk of the novel it would be 'flat'. I often found myself asking what the point of it all was.
And then it ends, and suddenly it's great again. We're left entirely unsure what to believe about what we've just read, confused about the identity of the narrator and about what happened, but in a way that felt like a magic trick rather than being frustrating. The ending of the novel is slippery and ambiguous and I really, really liked it. I just wish the rest of the book had been that good.
I'm glad I read this, and I'll definitely be seeking out more of Pamuk's work, but it unfortunately wasn't the most auspicious start to this project.