Silent House

August 13, 2012
In this first English publication of an early novel by the Nobel laureate, nonagenarian widow Fatma Darvinoglu lives in the eponymous house, a derelict villa in a seaside village near Istanbul. Bitter, sharp-tongued, and irritable, she arrived there as a teenage bride and endured the ensuing decades while her husband, Selahattin, sold off her jewelry to support his writing of a 48-volume encyclopedia intended to prove to his superstitious countrymen that God does not exist and that only by worshipping science could Turkey hope to achieve Westernized civilization. Their son, Dogan, an alcoholic like his father, died at 52, leaving three now adult children who have come to Cennethisar for their annual visit with grandmother. Faruk, the eldest, is a failed historian; Nilgun, his sister, is drawn to the Communist Party; adolescent Metin is jealous of his wealthy peers who drink immoderately and do drugs. The siblings are aware that the dwarf Recep, their grandmother’s servant, is also their uncle. Recep and his crippled brother, Ismail, were the product of Selahattin’s liaison with a servant. Ismail’s son, Hasan, a high school delinquent, has joined with nationalist thugs who frighten villagers. While Pamuk deftly suggests the political strife that roiled Turkish society before the 1980 coup, this narrative never achieves the richness and depth of his later work. All but one of the eight major characters are neurotic, self-pitying, resentful, contemptuous of others—even while they yearn to assuage their loneliness—and filled with grandiose dreams of what they’ll never achieve. Pamuk uses stream-of-consciousness to convey their inchoate thoughts, and he’s most effective when chronicling Hasan’s increasing mental instability. Pamuk’s belief that “istory’s nothing but a story” adds substance to what is otherwise a dispiriting tale. Agent: Andrew Wylie.

Each of the five narrators in this excellent audio production admirably embodies the character he or she portrays, and two are outstanding. Juliet Mills, in a voice that suggests age as well as determination, elicits both sympathy and disgust for Fatma, the spiteful 90-year-old Hanin family matriarch who longs for the simplicity of her childhood. John Lee's measured baritone captures the infinite patience of the dwarf Recep, Fatma's man Friday, whose clear-eyed acceptance of the old woman and her three grandchildren (as well as his own illegitimate niece and nephews), nonetheless, leaves him powerless to stop their self- destructive behavior. This recent translation of Pamuk's novel, published in Turkish in 1983, unfolds largely through stream-of-consciousness and is admirably suited to audio. L.X. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine