SOURCE: Mannes-Abbott, Guy. “Ancient and Modern.” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 360 (7 July 1995): 41.

In the following review, Mannes-Abbott applauds Pamuk's writing style and his success in representing “the texture and complexity of life in contemporary Istanbul” in The Black Book.

The Borgesian style is the literary equivalent of the Duchampian in visual art: an identifiable set of formal assumptions, which still remain curiously dissident. When The White Castle, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's only other novel in English appeared in the US, it was properly compared to Borges and Calvino. The Black Book is like a 400-page extravaganza by the Argentinian master—which is almost inconceivable, and will guarantee Pamuk's international reputation.

Carcanet Press bravely translated The White Castle in 1990, before its American hurrah, and Faber published the paperback. It was preceded by two novels in the 1980s and Pamuk's fifth, The New Life, was recently published in Turkey...