MAY BOOK
Our book for May is The White Castle (link) by the Turkish Nobelist Orhan Pamuk. We'll meet at the Steamworks Brew Pub (Steamworks) by Waterfront Station, back on the patio as the rumors of spring seem to be true. (If the patio is full, look for us inside.) So that's Tuesday, May 2 with the usual 7pm start time. Come one, come all! No one will be turned away.
From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja--"master"--a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.
