Silent House (novel)
Silent House (Turkish: Sessiz Ev) is Orhan Pamuk's second novel published in 1983 after Cevdet Bey and His Sons.
The novel tells the story of a week in which three siblings go to visit their grandmother in Cennethisar, a small town near Istanbul.
The names of the five narrators in the novel in turn are Recep, Fatma, Hasan, Faruk and Metin.
The distribution of the chapters to the narrators are as following: The novel makes use of stream of consciousness and internal monologue.
Silent House takes place just one month before the military coup of September 12 in Turkey.
Behçet Necatigil summarizes the plot of the novel: One of the five narrators of Silent House, historian Faruk does some research on Ottoman History in an archive in Gebze which is a small town near Istanbul.
The owner of the house is an old, lonely and depressed woman named Fatma Hanim who is also referred to as grandmother and Buyukhanim in the novel.
During their marriage, he dedicated his life to working on a massive encyclopedia that he claimed would enlighten the nation, freeing its people from, among other things, what he saw as a foolish belief in God.
Hasan appears in front of Nilgun suddenly while she is going back home to tell her about the plan that his friends made for her.
[1][2] One reviewer argued that the book "inherits its tense atmosphere of conflicting ideologies" from Fathers and Sons, which Nilgun reads.
[5] Armstrong, in Hurriyet Daily News, described the novel as "one of [Pamuk's] more successful balancing acts between ["his taste for lofty intellectual flights of fancy and the need to spin a good yarn"].
Calling it a gripping snapshot of a divided country, he described the use of interior monologues narrated by each character as "a Faulknerian touch that gives thrust and variety to the story".
[4] Arana wrote that "it will have you flipping back and forth constantly, wondering how the puzzle fits [...] it is a remarkable mirror on the din and dissonance of the day.
"[5] Max Liu, in The Independent, praised "its immediacy, topicality, early signs of the inventiveness and conviction that would later distinguish novels such as The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence.
"[3] Asif Farrukhi argued in Dawn that "Pamuk focuses his attention on individual lives and their concerns, without indulging in political allegorisation or heavy symbolism to make them more 'representative' of what is happening in the country [...] With a sure and steady hand, he introduces larger questions which [characters] are confronted with".
[6] In The Independent, David Evans said the book succeeds as a commentary on contemporary Turkish politics, and also argued that "Pamuk nimbly shifts between these characters as they muse on the subjects close to them [...] demonstrating an early mastery of technique.
[...] in dramatising a range of different perspectives, the book stresses the importance of listening to dissenting views".
But it never seems didactic because the reader comes to realize that these reflections are aspects of the inner life: plausible components of the characters’ psyches.
"[2] The Guardian's Mark Lawson implied that Silent House was not among Pamuk's finest works, and said some cultural tensions within the country are represented "perhaps a little schematically."
Nonetheless, Lawson stated, "A novelist prescient enough to publish [Hasan's predictions about the involvement of Islamist young men in a terrible event] in 1983 proved himself fully deserving of the call from the Swedish Academy in 2006.
"[1] A writer for Kirkus Reviews argued, "Using a repetitive, circular, incremental technique, Pamuk builds a multifaceted panorama distinguished by his customary intellectual richness and breadth.
"[8] A reviewer in Publishers Weekly was more unfavorable, saying, "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.
