by Orhan Pamuk · 1985
A frame narrative presents a manuscript found by a modern editor: the first-person account of a young Italian scholar captured by pirates and enslaved in seventeenth-century Istanbul, given as a gift to "Hoja," an Ottoman scholar who so physically resembles him that the two become entangled in an obsessive intellectual and psychological rivalry. Together they serve the sultan as astrologers/scientists and design a giant siege weapon used in a military campaign against a fortress, while their identities increasingly blur and swap.