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A poignant portrayal of life in 1980s Turkey

Muneera Parbeen explores an early piece of work by Orhan Pamuk
SILENT House is a 1983 novel by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, written and published in Turkish. It is almost three decades later that it has been translated into English, which lets us have a peek into the earlier works of one of the finest writers of our times.
This book is Pamuk's second published work and is markedly different from his latter masterpieces - the works that we are more familiar with like Snow, My Name is Red or The White Castle. It is not as mysterious, magnificent or witty in comparison but definitely shows the writer's strength in keeping his audience entrapped with his story telling.
The backdrop of the story is a coastal tourist spot. Three young people arrive here from Istanbul to pay a visit to their octogenarian, invalid grandmother who lives alone in a big, decaying house in the care of a devoted but oppressed dwarf servant called Recep. And to visit the graves of their deceased parents.
The decaying house is symbolic of all that happens in the story. The grandmother Fatma is an embittered matriarch. A Turkish version of Miss Havisham, Fatma is still reeling from the bitterness of her disastrous marriage to an idealistic doctor Selahattin who brought her away from those she knew and loved into an obscure small place, chasing dreams that never materialised. His extremely modern religious and political views and alcoholism in later life still manage to enrage her so many years after his death.
Here arrives Faruk, Nilgun, and Metin. Faruk is an alcoholic like his father and grandfather. He is a divorced professor disillusioned with life. Nilgun is a young woman with leftist views while the youngest Metin is a young student desperately looking for love - and sex -and money which he believes will ail be his when he is able to go to America. Other characters with a stake in the story are Recep's brother Ismail, Ismail's right-wing nationalist son Hassan who is in love with Nilgun. The deceased doctor Selahattin also makes his presence felt.
Pamuk uses the narrative in the first person in each of the thirty-two chapters of this book, giving us a peek into the mind of each character and the story proceeds from everyone's perspective. This allows a stream of consciousness to sip into the story telling.
We learn that Fatma is not only engulfed in the shaky present of health issues and loneliness but that the dark fear of an impending death haunts her like a nemesis. She resents being at the mercy of Recep, who also happens to be one of her deceased husband's two illegitimate sons.
Her own son died early along with his wife and now every year when her young grandchildren come to visit her from Istanbul, she dreads their presence on top of everything else that deludes her. However, this visit also gives her a chance to shift her focus from being nasty towards Recep to being mean to the surviving members of her clan.
Fatma doesn't like anything. The silence of the empty house translates to endless noise for her -the sound from the beach resorts, the sound of her own loneliness, imaginary creaking floors and the constant fear that Recep will tell her grandchildren that he and his brother are actually their grandfather's illegitimate sons.
Fatma's delusive and deriding fear, Nilgun's quiet loneliness, Faruk's frustration and
Metin's desperation, Hassan's misplaced devotion to right-wing politics - all evoke a sense of impending times. It is 1980 - just months before a military coup takes place. Times, needs and values are changing rather rapidly. The perceptive writer that he is, Pamuk gently but distinctively weaves these and other existing cultural tensions in Turkey at the time into his story. The book is a good portrayal of the political and social structure in Turkey at the time, especially the growing frustration among its young people in their long struggle for modernity.
As the story progresses it starts to feel a bit draining, slightly suffocating, almost like a prelude to something terrible that is waiting to happen. The right leaning Hassan is in love with a left leaning Nilgun, Metin chases a girl from the local jet set that is quite beyond his actual reach - such clashing situations all set the tone for disasters that could follow.
Orhan Pamuk uses a melancholy tone in building up to the end. The format is straight and the narration from page to page builds up expectations that keep the reader rightly hooked through to the last page to see what happens next.
Silent House is definitely about a family saga, but symbolic of life in Turkey in early 1980 before the military set its tentacles into the fabric of its society, changing the country's destination.
The book is definitely not the first example one would point out to someone to explore the works of the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. But as an earlier work of a writer who has lived on to give us some of the best literature of our times, it is not disappointing at all.
The original book in Turkish won the 1984 Madarah Roman Odiilu in Turkey and the translated book was short listed for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize. It was translated by Robert Finn.
MUNEERA PARBEEN, JOURNALIST AND CRITIC,
IS BASED IN LONDON