Pamuk's "Silent House" in the shadow of the military coup

"Silent House", the second novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (published in Turkish in 1983), describes three generations of an Istanbul merchant family. In 1984, this novel, translated into French, received the Madarali Award, and in 1991, the European Discovery Award. It has recently been available to our readers in the edition of Geopoetika and translated by Mirjana Marinković. This edition of "Silent House" is translated based on the author's revised Turkish edition from 2012. In the novel "Silent House", Pamuk weaved social, historical and philosophical considerations into a story based on the great dilemmas of the characters.

In this novel, a great writer and the beginnings of great themes (individual and ideology, the insidious effect of history and the past, family stories, conflict of generations, politics...) can be seen, which will later culminate in Pamuk's most important novels, "Crna knjiga", "My name is Red ”, “Snow”, “Museum of Innocence”.

The action of the novel "Silent House" takes place in July 1980, a little more than a month before the military coup (September 12) in Turkey. Two brothers and a sister come for the holidays to the small fishing town of Dženethisar, not far from Istanbul, to their ninety-year-old grandmother Fatma, who lives in the house that their grandfather built after he was forced to leave Istanbul as a political exile. The family gathers in the grandmother's old house, which is taken care of by a submissive servant, Redžep, a poor man.

Fatma has lived in that house since her late husband, Selahatin Darvinoglu, was driven out of Istanbul by the Young Turk regime, branding him as an idealistic young doctor. Isolated in a dilapidated old house, Selahatin became more embittered over the years, and his happiness was reflected in writing an encyclopedia in a desperate attempt to spread Enlightenment ideas in the "blinded East".

At the annual meeting and memorial to Selahatin Darvinoglu, there are Fatma and her three grandchildren: Faruk, an alcoholic and recently divorced father-in-law, Metin, an ambitious high school graduate who hangs out with the local children of the rich and dreams of moving to America, and their sister Nilgun, a sensitive young leftist enthusiastic about communism. . There's also Hasan, who works with a local gang of nationalist hooligans and suffers from an unfortunate obsession with Nilgun.

Hasan is a poor relative of the servant Redzep, who is later revealed to be one of Selahatin's illegitimate children, which means that all the characters are related, although unaware of this fact.

While three young people - Faruk, Nilgun and Metin spend their days off in the shade of a fig tree in the yard, behind the closed door on the first floor, their grandmother in the silence of her room sorts through memories whose main character is her husband, a misunderstood educator carried away by the idea that with his encyclopedia dedicated his whole life to reviving the East. The house servant Redžep, a silent observer, revives the sad secrets of three generations of this family in his memories, and on the other side of the courtyard wall, a group of young right-wingers is making plans that will decide the September coup d'état.

"The Silent House" contains 32 chapters, each of which is narrated by a different narrator in the first person. The names of the five narrators of the official and unofficial line of the Darvinoglu family are: Redzep, Hasan, Faruk, Metin and grandmother Fatma. Using the technique of alternating narration (as in Faulkner's novel "As I lay dying"), Pamuk presents their contrasting narrative positions that reflect the current state of society, the violent political tensions between different social and economic layers in Turkish society on the eve of the 1980 coup.

"Silent House" is an inspiring and passionate book about a microcosm of a country sinking towards a military coup. It brilliantly captures the disorder, nostalgia and hope of a society struggling with violence and self-definition. It is also a tense family saga, enchanting and unforgettable, but at the same time a ruthless portrait of the Turkish intellectual class. And as the New York Times critic notes, “The book's pages run through ideas about history, religion, class memory, and politics. But it does not pretend to be instructive, because the reader realizes that all these are reflections of the inner life: convincing ingredients of the soul.

It is a joy to be transported to the Turkish coast and meet this strange family and their neighbors, who all seem to live in many places at the same time: in the present and the past, in history, in everyday reality and at the same time in the boundless and limited worlds of their own minds".

About this novel, its author, Pamuk, said: "I know that young people like the Silent House more than my books. Maybe it's because my youth and my spirit are present in it. Each of the young heroes in the Silent House was me. In each of them I experienced different aspects of youth."

One of the inspirations for "Silent House" was the letters that Orhan Pamuk's grandfather wrote to his grandmother

One of the inspirations for "Silent House" was the letters that Orhan Pamuk's grandfather wrote to his grandmother.

“My grandfather went to Berlin to study law at the beginning of the 20th century. Before he left, he got engaged to my grandmother, Nikfal. My grandfather wrote many letters to his fiancee in Istanbul, while he was studying in Berlin. The attitude of those letters is like Selahatin's attitude towards Fatma. I know that my grandmother's opinion of those letters was that they were sin, forbidden things, and indifference. When I tried to dream about their unhappy relationship, I began to fictionalize the Silent House".

He dreamed of becoming a painter

Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952. He grew up in the Nişantaş district of Istanbul, in a family similar to the ones he describes in his novels "Dzhevdet Bey and His Sons" and "The Black Book". After finishing high school, he studied architecture, but then decided on journalism. He left his studies at the Technical Faculty, enrolled at the Istanbul University Journalism Institute and graduated in 1976.

Pamuk, who says that in his childhood and youth he fantasized about becoming a painter, actively devoted himself to writing in 1974. He published his first novel "Dževdet-bey and his sons" in 1982. Then followed: "Silent House", "White Fortress", "Black Book", "New Life", "My Name is Red", "Other Colors", "Snow ”, “Istanbul: memories and the city”, “Museum of Innocence”.

For his works, he received numerous Turkish and international literary awards, among which the most significant are the IMPAC Dublin Award, Prix Médicis étranger, the German Booksellers' Peace Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, and the "Norman Mailer" Lifetime Achievement Award. Orhan Pamuk's books have been translated into forty world languages ​​and have sold millions of copies.