Silent House

In a crumbling Ottoman mansion in a sleepy seaside town, a widow, Fatma, endures the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. Her late husband, a secular firebrand, moved her out from Istanbul years ago to devote himself to writing an encyclopaedic book which would teach the Turks the values of secularism and modernity: now he is long gone, and Fatma, attended to by her faithful dwarf Recep, is a semi-monstrous figure, selfishly oblivious to the drama about her. Amongst her visiting grandchildren are Faruk, a failed historian; the gifted and diligent Metin, who dreams of a life in the West and is desperate, at any cost, to infiltrate the society of rich teenagers in the town; and  Nilgun, a sensitive and slightly naive young leftist. When Recep's nephew Hasan, a disaffected drifter with nothing to do but dabble in right-wing nationalism, falls for Nilgun, the stage is set for an explosive series of events.

Orhan Pamuk needs no introduction to global audiences, but Silent House might. His second novel, originally published in 1983, it has only now been translated into English by Robert Finn. It's a surpise that it has taken this long, since Silent House is neither prologue nor footnote to Pamuk's celebrated career, but easily ranks alongside My Name is Red and Snow.

The novel's chapters are written from the point of view of alternate characters, with a fine balance of empathy and irony and a rich atmosphere of claustrophobia and foreboding that's lightened by the illicit adventures and fleeting freedom of his characters' youth. Although the drama is played out on a domestic scale, the scene never straying far from the crumbling mansion and the little seaside town, it draws on the ever-present conflicts in Turkish life: between the religious and the secular, the nationalistic and the cosmopolitan, the provinces and the city. While Fatma and her husband's abandoned masterwork bring the country's past psychodramas into the present, the military coup of 1980 looms just ahead of the book's timeframe - letting us know that whatever unpleasant surprises this family's summer produces, worse, perhaps, is on the way.