Silent
House
By Orhan
Pamuk
(Alfred A. Knopf, 334 pages,
$26.95)
About halfway through Silent House, Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk has one of his characters—a rather pathetic failed
history professor named Faruk—complain that, “I had to find a
little story, to make a convincing tale! The structure of our brain
probably has to change if we are ever to see and understand
clearly, not just our history, but also the world and life itself.
That passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time,
dragging us off to a world of fantasy, even as we continue to live
in one of flesh and blood…”
But Faruk is wrong, proven so by the very book he is part of.
Silent House, only now appearing in an English
translation, was Mr. Pamuk’s second novel, completed when he was
only 30 years old. This was before he had developed the convoluted,
highly stylized technique—one might almost call it neo-rococo—that
makes some of his more famous later works, tours de force like
The White Castle and My Name Is Red, both
rewarding and laborious reading. By contrast, Silent House
is a simple, straightforward “little story.” Most of its live
action takes place under and around a single roof during a brief
summer family reunion, albeit one that draws on three generations
of haunting, and occasionally haunted, familial memories. It is
these memories, seen from the different perspectives of a
matriarch, her dead husband, and their offspring—both legitimate
and illegitimate—that bridge and illuminate three generations of
roiling Turkish history.
Although Mr. Pamuk has said that Snow, a gripping,
slightly surreal tale of a fictitious coup d’état attempt set in
the wastes of Anatolia, was his “first and last political novel,”
Silent House is, in its own way, a political saga. It
chronicles the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the fatally flawed
“Young Turk” attempt at imperial revival that ended in mass murder
and humiliating defeat, the rise of a new Turkish republic led by
the larger-than-life figure of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—a remarkable
strongman who died before the concrete of his national vision had
time to set—and the subsequent mix of progress and decay, hope and
disillusionment, patriotism and alienation, that have characterized
the Turkish nation ever since.
BESIDES WHICH, Silent House is a good novel in its own
right. The action is cleverly plotted and the characters are
sharply drawn, with a depth of psychological insight and a breadth
of empathy that one might not have expected in a 30-year-old author
just cutting his novelistic teeth. The emotion is true, the ironic
humor is telling but not distracting, and the pace never flags.
Silent House flips the old cliché about not being able to
see the forest for the trees. It teaches us that to truly
understand a forest, you must first understand individual trees.
Sadly, this is a lesson most of its characters understand no better
than the real-life ideologues of the left and right, who tend to
think of people as inert building material for their abstract
social constructs.
And then there is the enigmatic allure of Turkey itself, so
little felt and appreciated in the West. Before the fall of the
Iron Curtain, people used to say that Vienna was two different
cities. If you approached it from the Communist-dominated East,
Vienna seemed to be a bustling, modern metropolis compared to
anything Hungary, Poland, or Czechoslovakia had to offer. But if
you approached it from the other side, Vienna felt like a charming
but antiquated provincial relic, more of a museum than a living
center of Western culture and commerce. The same is true, though in
a very different way, of contemporary Turkey.
Straddling the great divide between Europe and Asia, Christendom
and Islam, Turkey wears two faces. Viewed from the East, it looks
like a prosperous pillar of stability and civic order, especially
when compared to any of its Muslim neighbors. Viewed from Western
Europe, however, it presents a different picture, that of a country
dangerously divided: on the one hand, a pampered and often corrupt
pseudo-Western economic and social elite relying on the Turkish
military to protect both its privileges and its secular values; on
the other hand, a growingly militant and sometimes violent mass
movement of Islamists—many of them poor urban immigrants from the
backward, neglected countryside—determined to purge their country
of alien “impurity” and turn it into a theocracy by whatever means
necessary.
While there is a lot to this bifurcated view of Turkey, it is
only part of the truth. It ignores what might well be called
Turkey’s “Silent Majority”: the millions of decent, ordinary
Turks—almost all of them observant but law-abiding Muslims—who want
to live in a fair, orderly society, earn a decent living, and
improve economic and educational opportunities for their children.
They also resent seeing their traditional social values being
ridiculed by an effete, privileged elite while simultaneously being
perverted into violence and barbarism by fanatics claiming to act
in the name of the God they worship.
Whether consciously or intuitively, Mr. Pamuk seems to
understand all this. He expresses it through a cast of characters
that covers the full range of Turkish society, from a humble,
impoverished seller of lottery tickets and his family to the
spoiled children of a new class of affluent Turks who equate
sophistication and modernity with a superficial imitation of the
worst characteristics of Euro-trash materialism. So much so that,
by novel’s end, the most admirable character left standing—the
nearest thing to a heroine has already died a sad and purposeless
death—is a much-put-upon dwarf named Recep. Despite his grotesque
physical form, the dutiful Recep embodies many of the sturdy,
decent qualities of ordinary Turks—loyalty, steadiness, compassion,
and courage—that have kept their country afloat in the stormiest of
times, and may yet see it through to better days.
In the meantime, readers can enjoy Silent House not
just for the valuable lessons it teaches, but also for the sheer
joy of Mr. Pamuk’s unaffected, exuberant early style, curiously
reminiscent of Charles Dickens in his youthful prime, and rendered
into flawless, flowing English by translator Robert Finn.
