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Commenting on the novel which is a touching and terrifying story of love, memories and ghosts from the past, Pamuk says: "I know that young people like the Silent House … because there is something about my youth and my spirit in it... Each of the young characters in the Silent House was me. In each of them, I tampered a different aspect of the youth…, their car racing, their getting drunk, their going to discos and to the beach and killing time are from the real stories of my friends…I was among them and while I was writing this novel I remembered them with a smile on my face." Like a true postmodernist rebel, Orhan Pamuk represents the interface between cultures, a diasporic persona in a rigid society struggling with the pangs of shedding its dark Ottoman past. The past has to be remembered and any amount of westernisation cannot justify the forgetting of one's history. "If you try to repress memories, something always comes back", "I'm what comes back", reiterates Pamuk. Like The Black Book and The Museum of Innocence, this is Pamuk’s most admired with signs of topicality underlining his theory of fiction. The deafening silence of the murky mansion resounds in the secrets and shame of the five narrators. Pamuk deftly represents the world of ragged bars and seaside hangouts where the rich take a breather from the clashes between the nationalists and communists. The divergent ideologies jostling each other ricochet with the polemics that one experiences in Turgenev’s novel that Nilgun is reading, juxtaposing tradition and modernity, continuity and change in a style that intermingles mystery, romance, and philosophical puzzles with the tension between East and West, the encounters between Europe and the turbulent Ottoman Empire, and the inbuilt European aspiration of a Muslim nation. This takes me to the foremost concern of the novel that examines the interface between literature and politics, especially in societies where people are severely disturbed by political disorder. Fatima’s dead husband had compelled her to sell her jewellery to facilitate his writing an encyclopaedia "so that the East, which has been slumbering for centuries, will wake up." Faruk, on the other hand, is of the view that stories are only meant for pleasure and hilarity, though his mother Fatima reminiscences on her love of Robinson Crusoe and respect for literature which she feels is the last hope for survival in the dark nightmare of history. Art for her becomes an affirmation of life; her consolation in the end lies in caressing a book. As Pamuk maintains, "Literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting."
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orhan
Recep’s nephew Hasan,
is a conservative nationalist who draws the family into the vortex of
political turmoil that marked Turkey’s struggle coming to terms with
modernity. He imagines that, "The television and newspapers will
talk about me one day …" when he would be bring about a
revolution. Secretly in love with Nilgun, Hasan follows her on her
morning ritual of going with Turgenev's fathers and sons to the beach
where, on discovering her left-wing leanings, he confides in his
friends who plan waylaying her. Realising the harm that he might have
put Nilgun to, Hasan informs her. But Nilgun admonishes him as a
fascist provoking Hasan into thrashing her brutally. She is taken
home, but dies of brain hemorrhage next morning. In the end, the
grandmother is told that the children have decided to leave. She waits
for them in her bed, but in vain. The dreariness of the house remains
unabated and silence returns once again to aggravate the bitterness of
the old grandmother.