Geoffrey Fox's Reviews > The White Castle

A young Venetian becomes slave of a Turk whom he greatly resembles & over several decades assists in his schemes, especially the invention of a monstrous war machine, to win the favor of the sultan. Each man — slave and master — teaches the other his language & details of his culture, until, possibly but ambiguously, they exchange identities. One or the other of them escapes the wrath of the sultan (when the machine fails) & escapes to Italy. Multi-framed (a fictional contemporary claims to have discovered a manuscript, the manuscript turns out not to have been written by the person in whose voice it is told), to multiply the ambiguities of what is otherwise a not very interesting story. Ntbk 99/8/5