SOURCE: Berman, Paul. “Young Turk.” New Republic 205, no. 11 (9 September 1991): 36-9.

In the following review, Berman evaluates the portrayal of East/West conflicts in The White Castle and asserts that Pamuk is an “extravagantly talented” author.

Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle begins with a preface signed by one Faruk, explaining that the story to come was dug up from a seventeenth-century archive in a village outside Istanbul, has been rendered into modern idiom, and should not be weighed down with too many speculations about contemporary politics and East-West relations—which is, of course, a backhanded invitation to try out precisely those speculations, and indeed speculations of every sort. It is an amusing preface. It is a sort of theater curtain, dangling to arouse anticipation. And if it mystifies the American reader on small points—who is this Faruk, and who is the grandfather he invokes, or the dead sister...