The Silent House
November 2012
At one point in Silent House, a character muses, “I wonder what we’d be like if we’d been born to a Western family”. It is an impossible, perhaps even unanswerable, question but one which pervades this literary masterpiece.
Translated almost thirty years since its first publication in Turkey, the historical context is of a nation precariously close to civil war and on the brink of experiencing the bloody military coup of 1980. And yet, this being written by Orhan Pamuk – archaeologist of the interior, intellectual and gleaner of both Eastern and Western heritages – albeit a younger version, it is inflected with a Chekhovian sense of ennui and an unhappy family which might have descended from one of Tolstoy’s own creations.
Constructed by five overlapping perspectives, the novel is a domestic portrait as arresting as a great still life canvas; a memento mori, wherein life’s inextricability with death is laid before us, almost unbearable to experience for its portrayal of beauty’s transience, the passing of time and the violence of death. In a house trapped in stasis by the weight of memories and secrets, three orphaned siblings pay their annual summer visit to their grandmother. Fearful of impending death and sin, nonagenarian Fatma’s interior monologues are blistered with invectives. Flooded by recollections of a life married to the crusading Selâhattin whose unrealised life’s work was to both write a definitive Eastern encyclopaedia and to disabuse his fellow countrymen of the falsity of God’s presence, the agility of her mind is at variance with the stillness of her room. In a moment that is both Proustian and yet not, subverted as it is by being emptied of pleasure, Fatma beholds the objects on her table ‘to see if they have something more to say to me, but they have reminded me of so much already that they have nothing left to say.’
Recep, Selâhattin’s illegitimate adult son whose longing for companionship and conversation is palpable, co-occupies the house as a mostly silent servant. His corporeality is repository of a monstrous act and reveals other people’s humanity or lack thereof through his refracted image, for he is also a dwarf.
The setting of Cennethisar, a former fishing village now summer playground for the nouveaux riche, prompts disparate experiences for the siblings. The eldest, Faruk, a world-weary historian, is sunk in moral inertia by his alcoholism whilst his leftist sister, Nilgün, finds herself being trailed by her childhood friend and Recep’s nephew, disaffected Hasan. Metin falls in with an apathetic rich set and is increasingly inhabited by lovesickness and fantasies of death. The potency of knowledge withheld and words unsaid coils tight throughout the narrative engendering an atmosphere of dread as characters stumble around in ignorance or disregard, unable to recognise each other’s desperation.
There are motifs here that reappear in Pamuk’s later work; anxieties of cultural influence, romanticisation of beautiful females, the haunting of exiles and explorations of obsessions, alongside a brief postmodern reference to a writer named Orhan. To read a novel by Pamuk is to be subsumed by a world awash in poetry, ideas and tragedy; it is to feel not as a naïve sightseer in Turkey but a resident of its interior for the length of its exquisite, heartbreaking duration.
TAGS orhan pamuktali lavi
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