Book review: 'Silent House'

Book: Silent House
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 334
Price: Rs599

Silent House is an odd ‘new novel’. It was originally written by the Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk in 1983, but has only now been translated into English. You can see the themes that Pamuk would tackle in later works — the deep fracture within Turkish ideas of nationalism and the country’s difficult search for its own route to modernity. In Silent House, these ideas are examined through five narrators — Fatma, the grandmother; Recep, her servant; Faruk and Meitin, two of Fatma’s grandchildren; and Hassan, a young student, who happens to be Recep’s nephew.

The novel is set in 1980, over the period of a week, in Cennethisar which is a village-turned-resort town, a short distance from Istanbul. A little after the events detailed in the book, the Turkish military launched a coup, ending the violence taking place between the Communist and Nationalist factions within the country. This violence sits just behind the action of the novel, like the pressure of a thunderstorm just over the horizon, adding an extra frisson to the interactions among the characters. In essence, though, the questions and drives are internal to the character-narrators. Each section is a snapshot into a headspace, a point of view; each carefully etched out, distinct, and so well drawn that a reader can move easily from one to the other, despite the transition from one generation to another, higher classes to servant quarters.

Hovering above these five narrators is one last figure, probably the most important: Selahattin Bey. We discover his story largely through Fatma, his wife. He is a character whom Indians will relate to easily. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, he is part of a social elite that is Westernised and politically engaged. He desperately wants his country to be respected by the Europeans, but once he is sent into exile by the political establishment, he is reduced to vague ideas of dragging "the East" forcibly towards modernity. He fixates on the ideas of scientific methodology and, attendant to that, of atheism.

As a doctor, he harangues his patients about the non-existence of God, until none of them come to him. He has a grand project of creating an encyclopedia, translating all of the greatest scientific advances of Europe into Turkish. This grand project goes uncompleted, much like the failed dreams of his son. His grandchildren, too, seem fated for failure: the drunken, divorced Faruk and the shallow Metin, who dreams of nouveau riche achievements made in America. The intellectual dreams of Selahattin Bey are sterile, based on ideas imported from abroad — he even registers his name as Darvinoglu, meaning "the descendant of Darwin" — and stained by the sale of his wife’s jewellery and sex with his maidservant. His descendants are equally divided and sterile. Only his grand-daughter, Nilgun — barely represented — and Hasan, the son of one of Selahattin Bey’s children by the maidservant and full of incoherent rage, are undivided. One pays the cost and the other does not even realise there is one.

Silent House is a complex, brooding novel, full of the strains of a country unsure of where it is going; driven to ideas of “European progress", even — or maybe especially — if the ideas are only half-understood. Here, ignorance adds a wild, mutated energy to the dreams from a different land.