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First time in English
Knopf
October 2012
On Sale: October 9, 2012
352 pages
ISBN: 0307700283
EAN: 9780307700285
Kindle: B007UH4JJ4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Family Life
Never before published in English, Orhan Pamuk’s second
novel is the story of a Turkish family gathering in the
shadow of the impending military coup of 1980.
In an
old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near
Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of
her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades,
ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran
afoul of the sultan’s grand vizier and arrived to serve the
poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her
constant servant Recep, a dwarf—and the doctor’s
illegitimate son. Despite mutual dependency, there is no
love lost between mistress and servant, who have very
different recollections—and grievances—from the early years,
before Cennethisar grew into a high-class resort surrounding
the family house, now in shambles.
Though eagerly
anticipated, Fatma’s grandchildren bring little consolation.
The eldest, Faruk, a dissipated historian, wallows in
alcohol as he laments his inability to tell the story of the
past from the kaleidoscopic pieces he finds in the local
archive; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün, has yet to
discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics;
and Metin, a high school nerd, tries to keep up with the
lifestyle of his spoiled society schoolmates while he
fantasizes about going to America—an unaffordable dream
unless he can persuade his grandmother to tear down her
house.
But it is Recep’s nephew Hasan, a high school
dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who
will draw the visiting family into the growing political
cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long
struggle for modernity.
By turns deeply moving,
hilarious, and terrifying, Silent House pulses with
the special energy of a great writer’s early work even as it
offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which
Orhan Pamuk would later be celebrated the world over.
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