For most Westerners it's probably fair to say that Turkish culture is a closed book; certainly the Turkey of Orhan Pamuk's fiction, with its Bosphorus mafia men, obsessive civil servants and maudlin prostitutes, is not something you encounter on a jolly beach holiday. This is dense, difficult prose full of traps and mirrors and Borgesian tricks ostensibly a detective story, it's actually a meditation on identity, personal, religious and national. Each chapter of the "real" story alternates with "real" columns from a newspaper, Milliyet, which is, as it happens, a real Turkish daily. As the columnist spits out a dazzling collection of esoteric hits and pieces an essay on the history of Turkish mannequin making, a piece about a huckster shop in Istanbul - the narrator becomes enmeshed in a web of increasingly bizarre coincidences. Astonishing is honestly too small a word for it.
