Silent House

Written by Orhan Pamuk

Never before published in English, Orhan Pamuk's second novel is the story of a Turkish family gathering in the shadow of the impending military coup of 1980.

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan's grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf-and the doctor's illegitimate son. Despite mutual dependency, there is no love lost between mistress and servant, who have very different recollections-and grievances-from the early years, before Cennethisar grew into a high-class resort surrounding the family house, now in shambles.

Though eagerly anticipated, Fatma's grandchildren bring little consolation. The eldest, Faruk, a dissipated historian, wallows in alcohol as he laments his inability to tell the story of the past from the kaleidoscopic pieces he finds in the local archive; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün, has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin, a high school nerd, tries to keep up with the lifestyle of his spoiled society schoolmates while he fantasizes about going to America-an unaffordable dream unless he can persuade his grandmother to tear down her house.
But it is Recep's nephew Hasan, a high school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey's tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.

By turns deeply moving, hilarious, and terrifying, Silent House pulses with the special energy of a great writer's early work even as it offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which Orhan Pamuk would later be celebrated the world over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
• Release date: Oct 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9780385368025

Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is the author of such novels as The New Life, The Black Book, My Name Is Red and The White Castle. He has won numerous international awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. He lives with his wife and daughter in Istanbul.

Reviews for Silent House

[dawnlovesbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

great writer. a lot of screwed up characters!

[cecilturtle · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Roman incroyable dans la complexité et la gamme d'émotions des personnages et dans la simplicité de la langue. Les mots prononcés et les gestes posés se contredisent évoquant par ce fait l'immobilisme et le désespoir. Pamuk est un fabuleux romancier, et ce livre vaut que l'on y consacre du temps

[mlleehreen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

SILENT HOUSE is the sort of book that provides plenty of fodder for conversation, but before I get around to that I need to say something about this translation, because it appears to be awful. The overall tone is "clumsy," and reading is like having a conversation with someone who might be very eloquent in their native tongue but is reduced to fourth-grade-level flailing in English. It's not up to the standards that I expect from Knopf, one of the few publishing imprints that still inspires any kind of romantic awe in me, let alone a Nobel Prize winning author whose previous books have completely transported me with their intelligence, subtlety, and emotional power.

Reading a translated book always requires a certain amount of blind faith; you have to trust that you're experiencing something like what the author originally wrote, and most of the time you can't do any kind of independent verification. Anyone who's ever tried translating knows that there's really no such thing as a perfect translation, which makes the illusion all the more crucial.

Wikipedia tells me that SILENT HOUSE was Pamuk's second book - was it written before his talents had really developed? Did the translator accurately reproduce a book with five alarmingly similar narrators, and do they read like childish simpletons in the original? If so, boy, has Orhan Pamuk grown as an author. If not? Then this translator screwed up, big time.

Alright. On to SILENT HOUSE. Three siblings visit their grandmother, Fatma, on a summer vacation. She lives in a crumbling old mansion not far from Istanbul, built before the area developed into a suburb for the very wealthy. The family belongs to the old elite, but badly diminished by time - the most recent patriarchs suffered from what could generously be called melancholy; less generously, a toxic combination of alcoholism and insanity. The grandchildren will be the last generation born into privilege unless one of them can turn things around...and none of the three are up to the task.

So we've got a story about an unhappy family, the generation gap, the class divide, Turkey's transition to a modern, more Westernized society. The dead but very present in spirit grandfather, Selahattin, fathered two children with a servant and his illegitimate family features in the book as well: his son Recep, a dwarf who lives and works in the house as a servant, and his grandson Hasan, a political extremist.

Every character in SILENT HOUSE is loathsome. And once I figured out that SILENT HOUSE is one of those books about awful people who do awful things, it was easy to predict how it would end: the one nice, sweet character dies tragically and senselessly.

I kept thinking that if this book weren't written by a Turk, no publisher would touch it with a ten-foot pole. The narrators include Hasan, who fantasizes about killing all the Communists and Atheists in Turkey, Metin, who fantasizes about emigrating to America so he can learn to build bombs, Fatma, who thinks science is evil, and then Salahattin and Faruk, both of whom consider scholarship to be little more than "copying down stuff that other people have already said." The book is filled with, I think, a deep contempt for all aspects of Turkish society - from the frivolous beach-goers to the hothead activists, the impotent scholars to the heartless conservatives.

And this is, again, where the problem of translation came in. Because Metin and Hasan, in particular, had very similar voices. Both teenage boys, both childish and irresponsible, both obsessed with girls they didn't know in the slightest. Both behaved very, very similarly toward these highly objectified women: falling "in love" after a second's glance, taking no interest in the girl's personality at all, becoming outright offended if the personality turned out not to conform to whatever ideal the boy preferred, becoming outraged if the girl rejected his advances. Both boys lacked any empathy, any self-awareness, but for quick flashes, like here, in Hasan's voice as he's watching a crowd of people on the beach and disapproving of the scantily dressed women:

"It's strange, sometimes I feel like doing something bad, then I feel ashamed, it's as if I want to hurt them a little so they'll notice me: that way, I would have punished them and nobody would give in to the devil and maybe they would only be afraid of me then. It's a feeling like this: we're in power and they're behaving properly because of it."

I feel like that could sound sort of astute and self aware or, as was more the case in my opinion, terrifyingly psychotic, depending on how it was translated. Were all the characters supposed to read like psychopaths, completely and utterly devoid of empathy? I can't tell! And keep in mind that these moments of insight from the characters are rarer than a reader of literary fiction might hope. The characters are unrelentingly shallow, and their musings are more along the lines of Metin's, here, as he fantasizes about how awesome life will be once he's rich:

"I'll be a heartless rich international playboy, pictured in the papers with the Countess de Roche-Whatever, and the next year, I'll live the life of a renowned Turkish physicist in America, Time magazine will catch us walking hand in hand in the Alps, me and Lady So-and-So, and when I come to Turkey on my private yacht to make a Blue Voyage, and you [the girl he's obsessed with; most of Metin's thoughts are addressed to her in the 2nd person] see me splashed across the front page of Hurriyet with my third wife -- the beautiful only daughter of a Mexican oil tycoon -- then, Ceylan, let's see if you don't say, I'm in love with Metin"

SILENT HOUSE deserves credit for showing how people with different worldviews work at cross-purposes, like ships passing in the night, never understanding one another, unable to communicate - unable to step back and take stock of what's gone wrong. It reduces all the great tectonic shifts in Turkish society to a collection of grudges, always secondary to the lowest drives of human nature: greed, lust, fear.

And it's curious for rendering the scholar, the writer, the most impotent of all. The most useless, the most pathetic - which is something extraordinary, in a cast of characters as pathetic as the one portrayed here. In SILENT HOUSE, writing is tantamount to giving up, to failure.

But getting to the interesting stuff in SILENT HOUSE takes a lot of digging and patience and tolerance. The translation is just so awkward, and - probably because I read an ARC from Edelweiss - the formatting was terrible, with words left out, strange punctuation, pages of dialogue mashed together without paragraph breaks, and one chapter still titled "TK". I can only recommend this to devoted fans, because anyone else will walk away from SILENT HOUSE with a poor opinion of Orhan Pamuk that he does not deserve.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This novel, although translated and released in English in 2012, was actually one of Pamuk's early works, originally published in 1983. It was interesting to read this early novel now, after having read almost all of his later works. There are glimmers of the masterful writer in this story, but it is nowhere near the eloquent, finely crafted quality of his current writing. Clearly, even from his earliest writing, Pamuk attempts to blend literary and political elements to convey through fiction, the political, social climate in Turkey at the time of significant events. I am just happy to have read his later, magnificent works. He is one of my all-time favorite authors!

[hillerm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What is thrilling in this book are the various styles that Pamuk uses to paint his characters, and the locale. Although there is the predictable movement from character to character via chapter to chapter, the point of view changes and the structure of the conversation with the reader constantly varies. Of special interest are the stream-of-consciousness sections by the Old Woman, and her flights into memory. As I read the book, I felt that Pamuk was beginning to explore his tools, and to hone his skills. One is never that far away from the local situation in Turkey, either through the memories of the Old Woman, or through the searches of the historian, or the experiments of the politicians represented in the siblings. This is a fine read.

[amanaceerdh · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

great writer. a lot of screwed up characters!