Silent House

In Nobel prize winner Pamuk's (Istanbul) second novel, published in Turkey in 1983 and translated into English in 2012, 90-year-old widow Fatma lives in a crumbling house in a resort town north of Istanbul. Her caretaker is the dwarf Recep, her husband's bastard son. Fatma and Recep squabble constantly but clearly cannot live without each other. Fatma harbors a decades-long resentment of her husband, who was exiled to the town and spent the rest of his life working on an encyclopedia of everything in the world. Her jewels were sold, piece by piece, to support the family and to keep her husband supplied with alcohol. Now it is time for Fatma's grandchildren to pay their annual summer visit. The young adults are caught up in a tumultuous time in Turkish politics, with nationalists are pitted against socialists. Faruk is an aspiring historian whose alcoholism overshadows his research. Nilgun professes to be a leftist and a feminist but is easily swayed. Metin is a high school nerd who desperately (and unsuccessfully) wants to be cool and popular. The multiple narrators—Emrhys Cooper, Jonathan Cowley, John Lee, Juliet Mills, and Steve West—convey both the comic and poignant scenes.