SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Quest.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (25 December 1994): 3.

In the following review, Eder compliments Pamuk's examination of personal and national identity in The Black Book.

[In The Black Book,] Orhan Pamuk's braided mysteries coil around the story of a plodding husband who searches for his restless wife through Istanbul's serpentine streets and historical memory. Once it was the Ottoman Empire's Constantinople and before that, the Byzantine Empire's, and long before that, the ancient Greek Byzantium.

For Pamuk, author of the warmly praised The White Castle, the city is a suffocating midden of 2,000 years of temporary victories and permanent defeat. Pamuk writes of the defeat. His philosophical detective story is, in fact, an evocation of the crippled consciousness and destructive reflexes of his fellow Turks: heirs of a traditional Eastern society, and engaged for three quarters of a century in a Westernizing project that still has...