Orhan Pamuk Silent House

Silent House by Orhan Pamuk, $26.95, 320 pp, Knopf Publishing
Review By Brett Warnke
         
             In the summer of 1980 Turkey’s elected government was replaced by a right wing military coup.  Before the seizure, fascist gangs hungry for adventure and thrills roughed up scapegoats.  Like the illiterate vigilante in the 1969 film Z who hoped to burn down nearby bookstores, paranoid thugs in Ohran Pamuk’s book Silent House see Communists, imperialists, agents, and Zionists in every corner—especially those with cash and women they can harass.
             Pamuk’s novel is set near Istanbul a month before the coup and takes the reader into the minds and neighborhood of an upper-middle class family in decline.  The 90-year old Fatma is “an old person who had forgotten why she was annoyed but determined never to forget that she was obligated to be.” She is the matriarch who, in a dusty mansion worth more demolished than standing, alongside her “dwarf” servant Recep, awaits a visit from her grandchildren: Faruk, a failed historian; his leftist sister, Nilgun; and Metin, a social climber with lusty dreams of female attention and American-style success.
Just as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury opened up the narration to individual Bundrens and Compsons, Pamuk’s multiple narrations similarly reveal the envies, desires, and resentments of a family struggling with modernity.
              Each character, including Hasan (one of the town’s vigilantes), are given several chapters and stream of consciousness narratives.  Fatma is undoubtedly the novel’s locus.  She is married off young to a drunken idealist dreaming of a single unified encyclopedia that would shake the Turks of their religious and traditional delusions.   She slowly begins subsidizing her husband’s undercooked efforts with her dowry and in her ninth decade brims with boiling resentment at how he squeezed “money out of me so he could print those crazy writings that were all just curses from beginning to end.”
The godly Fatma bullies her loyal servant (a byproduct of one of her husband’s affairs) while her family spends their visit cacooned in their own desires.  Metin even drunkenly admits to his grandmother that he wants to demolish the family home for profit:  “That weird, silent house is still sitting on that plot of land for nothing.”
              Pamuk’s book is engrossing and ultimately tragic.  And its characters—even Recep—delight and edify us in bleakly relevant circumstances:  “So long as there is even a little light and the world isn’t in total darkness,” he informs us, “a person musn’t be frightened.”