A "new" Pamuk from 30 years ago: The Silent House

This may be a strange thing to say about a Nobel laureate who is also among the world’s highest-profile writers (the two things don’t always go together), but Orhan Pamuk’s career is still – for the English-language reader, at least – a jigsaw with missing pieces. Pamuk became internationally famous when the English translation of his brilliant My Name is Red, a metaphysical murder mystery set in the Ottoman Empire, was published in 2001 – a year when the Anglophone world had special reason to become interested in literature about the differences between Eastern and Western thought, written by someone from a city situated on the cusp of Europe and Asia. In the decade since, there has been a line of celebrated works including the great tragi-comic novel Snow, the lovely but rambling The Museum of Innocence and the plaintive memoir-travelogue Istanbul, as well as reappraisals of older books such as The White Castle. Yet, as the appearance of The Silent House reminds us, much still remains to be discovered about Pamuk’s early work.

Published in 1983, Sessiz Ev was among his most popular novels in his own country, but it has taken three decades for its first English translation (by the lecturer and diplomat Robert Finn) to reach us. This would have made The Silent House an important event almost independent of its literary merits; happily, no such concessions are needed because this is a powerful, multifaceted book with many pointers to what lay ahead for its author.

Set in a small seaside town not far from Istanbul, it employs the multi-narrator technique that Pamuk would later famously use in My Name is Red, though the structure is more straightforward: voice is not, for instance, given to a corpse (which Pamuk might have chosen to do, since one significant death takes place here), much less to coins or to trees. The story is propelled by the alternating narratives of five principal characters, notably a 90-year-old woman named Fatma and her housekeeper Recep, a middle-aged dwarf, and it centres on a visit by Fatma’s three grandchildren Faruk, Nilgun and Metin; watching the family from the sidelines is a young man named Hasan, who is attracted to Nilgun.

Though the main plot progresses in a neat, chronological way, the five narratives artfully link into each other so that bits of information are withheld from each character in turn (even if it is something as apparently trivial as the proprietorship of an Elvis Presley record), and this creates a web of misinterpretations. Much of the book’s power comes from its gradual revelation of character-defining details: how we come to learn the secrets of the jewellery box that Fatma is so paranoid about, for example, or about her unhappy relationship with her long-deceased husband and her treatment of his illegitimate children. Or how, immediately after an emotionally intense passage involving a visit to a cemetery, we get someone else’s detached, comical perspective on the same thing.

The period depicted here is a very specific, politically charged time in modern Turkish history, which would culminate in the military coup of September 1980. Though these politics are not explicitly addressed, they cast a shadow over the characters, especially the young people – divided between bored kids who fantasise about going to America, revolutionary manqués who denounce money even as they continue to lead relatively privileged lives, and right-wing nationalists who use the threat of violence. And an important subtext here is that the imperatives of youth - the headiness, the hormonal urges - can both work with and clash against ideology; this emerges, most disturbingly, in Hasan’s feelings about Nilgun, whom he idealises but also comes to fear and hate when he discovers she may have Communist leanings. More than once, I was reminded of other conflicted young people in Pamuk’s work, such as the boys in Snow who begin weeping when they suspect they might really be atheists.

The many possible futures of these youngsters are set against the long life of a woman who has barely lived at all: Fatma, who left Istanbul 70 years earlier and eventually retreated into herself – into the womb of her silent house, haunted by the memory of her doctor husband Selahattin who voiced “blasphemous” thoughts and futilely tried to acquaint her with a larger, more modern world. Like Robinson Crusoe (whose story is alluded to here), she lives as if on a private island, with Recep as a faithful Friday who understands her well enough to know that she “frowned to show her disgust, and her face stayed that way out of habit; the face of an old person who had forgotten why she was annoyed but determined never to forget that she was obliged to be”.

The chapters in her voice are the book’s highlights – a narrative tour de force that builds in intensity as it cuts between her own musings and her grandchildren’s attempts to small-talk with her. Here one also sees an early glimpse of Pamuk the stylistic experimenter: there is stream of consciousness and there are traces of the meta-fictional duality that he would later bring to more abstract novels such as The New Life. At one point one of the grandchildren asks “What did it used to be like around here?” and Fatma’s narrative continues: “I’m lost in my own thoughts and sorrows and I don’t hear what you’re saying, so how can I tell you that this used to be one garden after another, what beautiful gardens, where are they now...”. She is both absent and present; hearing and not hearing; participating in the current moment and obsessively reliving her past. Here and elsewhere, The Silent House is – like much of Pamuk’s other work – a self-reflective examination of the nature of storytelling, its possibilities and limitations; an account of the writer’s compulsion to create narratives even as he questions their usefulness. The theme recurs constantly, whether in Faruk’s scuppered attempts to seek order in history (“The passion for listening to stories leads us astray every time, dragging us off to a world of fantasy even as we continue to live in one of flesh and blood”) or in Selahattin’s ultimately tragic conceit that his 48-volume encyclopaedia might bring Western “enlightenment” to the antiquated Eastern world. (“I’ll fill that unbelievable gulf in thought in one fell swoop [...] There are millions of poor Muslims chained in the dungeons of darkness, millions of poor benighted slaves waiting for the light of my book!”)

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In an essay published in the anthology Other Colours, Pamuk admitted that My Name is Red “was a huge labour, designed as a classic that would speak to the whole country ... I wanted the whole country to read it and each to find himself reflected in it; I wanted to evoke the cruelty of history and the beauty of a world now lost.” Was he less self-conscious when he wrote The Silent House, and is it possible to suggest that this is to its advantage? I think so. This book has thematic complexity, raw skill and verve; it achieves many of the things he sought to do in his more mature work, while also working at the level of an episodic story. Despite the particularity of its setting and its period (Pamuk himself had hardly been out of his city at that point in his life), it is possible to make universal claims for it.

Among other things, it is a book about aging – one that should appeal to different readers in different ways, depending on the life-stage they are in – and one of the most impressive things about it is that the 30-year-old Pamuk so adeptly caught the inner states of three generations of people, all in their own traps. The thing to wait for now is a translation of a book written when he was even younger – his first published novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons – so that our fascinatingly anachronistic process of discovery can continue.

[Did this review for The Hindu]

Orhan Pamuk on readers and writers

[Did this review for The Hindu earlier this year]

In one of the essays that make up The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk mentions that after reading memoirs and conversing with other novelists, he came to realise that “compared to other writers, I put more effort into planning before I put pen to paper...I take somewhat greater care to divide a book into sections and structure it”.

This tone of this revelation is not self-congratulatory – it’s the tone of critical analysis, based on the understanding that there are different approaches to writing, each with its own strengths and limitations. If Pamuk takes some pride in his meticulousness, there are also times when he appears to express a melancholy envy for authors who are less self-conscious and to whom writing comes more easily.

The Nobel laureate’s repeated use of the words “naive” and “sentimental” in this book derives from Friedrich Schiller’s 18th century essay “Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung”, which distinguished between two types of poets: the “naive” ones who write spontaneously and unselfconsciously, almost as if they are being dictated to by an unseen power; and the “sentimental” ones who are painfully self-aware, reflective, questioning everything around them, including the artifice of their own writing. Novelists can be similarly classified, Pamuk proposes.

But it would be a mistake to think of this divide as a clear-cut one: the creative process is a mysterious and multilayered thing, in which “deliberate effort” and “natural, unforced talent” constantly overlap with and inform each other. For instance, if you read Pamuk’s own novels, you’ll probably agree that much of his work has a formal, cerebral quality that can have a distancing effect (an early book, The New Life, is a good example of this). But in the best of his writing – Snow and My Name is Red come immediately to mind – this quality coexists with an easy knack for humour, fluid use of language and a sense that the author succeeded in fully immersing himself in the world of his creating.

Of course, a novel hardly exists in isolation; it acquires a new life when readers respond to it, and readers can be categorised as naive and sentimental too. Extreme examples of the former are the literal-minded sorts who always read a text as an autobiography or as a disguised chronicle of the author’s experiences; on the other hand, there are completely sentimental-reflective readers who think all texts are constructs and fictions. “I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels,” writes Pamuk, tongue firmly in cheek. But somewhere between these two extremes lies the ideal reader, and as you turn the pages of The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist you begin to think that Pamuk himself must be very close to being one such.

Among the many pleasures of reading a good novelist’s reflections on his art is the pleasure of discovering that this writer is himself a passionate and opinionated reader, and that he responds to certain books and authors in the same way as “ordinary” readers do. Pamuk's descriptions of the effect that his favourite novels have had on him – “sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style” – are eloquent and moving. He uses great works of literature like Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick to illustrate important aspects of the reading and writing process (everyone, from Homer through Cervantes to Naipaul, is grist to his mill) and reflects on the novelist’s use of the tools available to him – character, plot, time and objects. What operations does the mind perform while we read, he asks. How do novels provide a rich second life for their readers? He also writes – somewhat enigmatically, not always with clarity – about the “secret centre” that a great novel should have, which the reader should – consciously or unconsciously – be seeking.

In such passages, some of Pamuk’s reflections can be arcane, especially if your level of engagement with literature isn’t as intense as his. But it’s a measure of the scope of this book that it allows this highbrow writer to show a charmingly down-to-earth side – when, for example, he compares the experience of following a soccer game on radio to reading a novel and transforming the writer’s words into mental pictures; or when he remarks that a reader like him has no hope of finding any kind of accessible meaning in James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel Finnegan’s Wake.

Speaking of the artistic calling that he almost took up before becoming a full-time writer, Pamuk admits, “I have always felt more childlike and naive when I paint, and more adult and sentimental when I write novels.” It was as if – he says in a very revealing passage – he wrote novels only with his intellect, but produced paintings solely with his talent. However, he also reflects that with age and experience, he may have found “the equilibrium between the naive novelist and the sentimental novelist within me”. His best novels are certainly a testament to this, and The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist is a good companion piece to them, a window into the mind of a very special writer and reader.

3 items on "naïve" readers

Item 1: Chetan Bhagat often gets letters from readers who don’t understand what a novel is – for example, the person who sorrowfully reprimanded him for revealing the name of a girl who engages in pre-marital sex in Five Point Someone: “You’ve ruined Neha’s life; her family and others will guess who she is; who will marry her now?” (More in this post)

Item 2: Aarushi Talwar’s father tells a policeman that his murdered daughter had been reading Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life. The cop responds: “Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What were the three mistakes?” (As reported by Patrick French in India: A Portrait; also excerpted here.) A case of a policeman clumsily bullying a suspect? Probably, but also possible that the man had little understanding of a book as a work of fiction unconnected to the circumstances (or mental state) of the person reading it.

Item 3: Orhan Pamuk discussing certain types of literal-minded readers in his new book The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist: "Completely naïve readers always read a text as an autobiography or as a sort of disguised chronicle of lived experience, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading a novel."

But at the other extreme, Pamuk tells us, are "completely sentimental-reflective readers, who think that all texts are constructs and fictions anyway, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading your most candid autobiography. I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels."

Thoughts on Pamuk's The New Life

Some went into solitude with the book, but at the threshold of a serious breakdown they were able to open up to the world and shake off their affliction. There were also those who had crises and tantrums upon reading the book, accusing their friends and lovers of being oblivious to the world in the book, of not knowing or desiring the book, and thereby criticising them mercilessly for not being anything like the persons in the book’s universe.

Can’t recall the last time I was so frustrated by a book as I was by Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life. Maybe with Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, which I blogged about here, but The Unconsoled was a book I grew to love – despite the initial bafflement and spots of intense irritation, I was drawn into its strange, surrealistic world. The New Life is another matter. It’s not easy to take to your heart, the way Pamuk’s Snow or My Name is Red are. It’s easier to admire than to like, and I was startled to learn that it was the fastest selling title in Turkish history when it was first published as Yeni Hayat in 1994. But even days after you’ve turned the last page, it’s difficult to stop thinking about it.

The New Life begins with the sentence “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed”. Through the often-abstruse narrative that follows, this line remains in a sense the closest summing up of what Pamuk’s book is about. The narrator is a young man, Osman (though we learn his name much later in the story), who first sees The Book in the hands of an attractive girl in college and buys it from a roadside stall on the way home. We don’t learn anything specific about the book at this stage, but we understand that Osman has become so affected by it that he comes to believe it has been created for him alone (which is, of course, exactly how many of us feel about things that matter a great deal to us). It seems to show him the path to a new world, the possibility of a new life; he gets obsessed with finding that life, even if it means discarding his present and turning his back on home and family.

He meets the girl, Janan, as well as her friend Mehmet, who seems to know something about the “new life” described in the book. Soon after this, both of them disappear and the narrator himself leaves home, embarking on a series of dreamlike bus journeys across the country, many of which end in serious accidents (this isn’t commented on much, it’s treated as being an almost inevitable conclusion to a bus journey). He finds Janan again, and following another accident they set off for the town of Guzul to meet a man named Doctor Fine, who is part of “a struggle against the book, against foreign cultures that annihilate us, against the newfangled stuff that comes from the West, an all-out battle against printed matter”.

The New Life certainly touches on the eternal conflict between East and West, a theme that has run through all of Pamuk’s work (it’s poetic justice that the city in which he has lived most of his life straddles both Europe and Asia). But it can also be seen in more general terms, as an allegory about the different ways in which people respond to works of art and how they appropriate certain works for themselves, bringing their own hopes and desires to them – and in the process often setting themselves up for disillusionment. In this context there is great poignancy in the narrator’s ultimate discoveries about the book and how it came to be written, and his uncovering of the mundane truths behind the little signs that have come to mean so much to him.

It’s reasonably obvious (even from the premise) that The New Life is an example of metafiction – self-referential literature that is constantly drawing attention to itself rather than allowing the reader to sink into its world. This sort of thing occurs quite frequently in Pamuk’s books – in the multiple first-person narratives of My Name is Red, for instance (especially the chapters narrated by the “tree”, the “gold coin” and the “horse”), or that superb passage in the theatre-hall in Snow, where the curtain dividing artifice from real life is almost literally torn down.

Take this bit in The New Life, where the narrator learns about a young man’s meeting with an author named Rifki Ray:

Rifki Ray had tried closing the subject as soon as he realised the strange young man at his door was interested in the book. A touching interview could possibly have taken place between the youthful fan and the elderly writer, but for Rifki Ray’s wife – that’s Aunt Ratibe, I interjected – who had interfered, as I had done just now, and had pulled her husband inside.

Note the disconcerting effect of “that’s Aunt Ratibe, I interjected” in conjunction with “who had interfered, as I had done just now”. By likening his own action (“I interjected”) to something that occurs in the story he is being told, the narrator is drawing attention to his own status as just another character in a novel. In other words, he’s tearing down the fourth wall between himself and the reader.

Another example of Osman self-consciously examining his own actions occurs when he’s watching TV with an elderly lady and wants to broach a delicate topic. On the screen, a thriller has given way to a documentary, and he says:

In the wee hours of the morning, when the moaning, the murmurs in the night and the death throes were replaced by an educational film on the lives of red and black crabs in the Indian Ocean, I approached the topic sideways like the sensible crab on the screen.

The above sentence is also an example of Pamuk’s piquant sense of humour, something that seems improbable considering the huzun (the word for the very particular melancholy he describes as being endemic to his city, Istanbul) that influences and permeates his work. Many of his characters are very downbeat, and themes such as unrequited love, irreconcilable differences between people and general hopelessness about the future are common to most of his books. But as I mentioned in this post about Snow, he’s also very funny in a morbid, absurdist way.

Almost in spite of itself, The New Life has many laugh-out-loud bits. I loved the subplot about Doctor Fine hiring five spies to track his son’s movements: the men are given codenames that are watch trademarks – Omega, Zenith and so on – and after some time the narrator simply begins referring to them as “Dr Fine’s watches”. And the high comedy of this passage doesn’t in the least conflict with the fact that the “watches” in question are heartsick, disgruntled men, doing hard work for little reward (they reminded me of the depressed old detective who was hired to trail the poet Ka in Snow). Pamuk knows how to mix his huzun and his humour without undermining either quality.

Portrait of a writer and his city

My review of Pamuk's Istanbul; it appeared in today's Business Standard and the link is here but the para breaks on the website are meaningless as always. So here's the full review:

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In the first chapter of this part-autobiography, part-tribute to his beloved city, Orhan Pamuk speaks of writers like Conrad and Naipaul, who "managed to migrate between languages, cultures countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile...mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city,on the same same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate".

It isn’t inappropriate for the author to mention his own name in the same breath as Conrad and Naipaul. In recent years, especially following the international publication of My Name is Red and Snow, Pamuk has moved from being Turkey’s best-known man of letters to being considered one of the world’s great fiction writers, and a future Nobel candidate. This makes it difficult to think of Istanbul as just a paean to a city: it can’t be treated purely as a travelogue, or even as a personal remembrance by a lesser-known writer. The appeal of this book depends equally on the insights it provides into Pamuk;s life and how he became the writer he is today. From that point of view, a certain amount of familiarity with his fiction is recommended before reading this.

Pamuk begins his memoir on an intimate scale, with descriptions of his early life in the five-storey apartment block his large family occupied in the 1950s. He speaks of family squabbles, sibling rivalry, secret fantasy worlds and of childhood quirks that persisted into adulthood ("I have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it..."). Then the world outside the apartment weaves its way into the narrative and the book’s structure turns schizophrenic. A discussion of the painter Melling’s depictions of the Bosphorus river is immediately followed by an unrelated chapter that gives us little Orhan in his house, making up games to deal with boredom (his account of adjusting a mirror triptych so that he could see the reflections of thousands of Orhans, many of them unfamiliar-looking, evokes the splintered, kaleidoscopic narrative of My Name is Red). Another chapter on the lives and work of four of Turkey’s great writers (including the poet Yahya Kemal) is followed incongruously by a personal account of Pamuk’s grandmother.

At other times a more careful link is established, as when the author recalls the various signs he saw on the city’s streets as a child, and then, to understand the "civilising mission" that these signs embodied, turns to a discussion of Istanbul’s newspaper columnists and city correspondents. This structure, or lack of it, marks an intriguing experiment but at times it almost feels like Pamuk is trying too hard for a freewheeling effect as he places the city’s life against his own.

According to Pamuk, the chief characteristic of Istanbul is the quality of huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy -- "not the melancholy of a solitary individual but the black mood shared by millions of people together". Much of this stems from Istanbul’s position as a city that stands at the crossroads of East and West (it is situated in both Europe and Asia), and as a once-great capital now reduced to ruins, bedevilled by reminders of its own lost glory. (Pamuk believes a key difference between his city and, say, Delhi or Sao Paulo, is that "in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past and civilisation are everywhere visible".) At any rate, this very particular form of melancholy is a theme that runs through the book, much like the Bosphorus winding through the city.

The author also writes movingly of Istanbul’s love-hate relationship with the western gaze: of "the ambivalence that besets literary Istanbullus on reading Western observations" about their city. He counts the tankers, liners and fishing boats that go up and down the river, and brings the clarity of a nightmare to an image of a looming Soviet warship rising out of the mist. In bringing the many shades of the city to life, he is aided by a wealth of black-and-white photographs (many of them by the famous Ara Guler) that are spread across the pages of this book; the pictures don’t quite illuminate the text in the intense, immediate way that, for instance, the ones in W G Sebald’s works do, but Istanbul would have been a lesser book without them, especially for a reader who is unfamiliar with the city.

Personally, I was more interested in the portions that dealt with Orhan’s life and his muses (there’s a beautiful chapter on his first love), and the frisson-creating little moments that echo scenes from his novels. But those portions can’t be sieved out from the whole, since, as the author admits, his own soul is part of the city’s. This book is so full of detailed information about Istanbul that it’s easy to overlook how much it reveals about Pamuk himself. In many ways, it’s more candid than a conventional autobiography might have been.

Istanbul isn’t always an easy read though. Some passages -- how to say this about a favourite author without flinching -- just aren’t as engaging as they should be. Pamuk isn’t really capable of being uninteresting but he comes close here occasionally, especially in a couple of descriptions that amount to little more than endless processions of semi-colons ("...of the mosques whose lead plates and steel gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries that seem like gateways to another world, and their cypress trees; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passer-by; of the clock towers no one ever notices...")

Whatever its shortcomings, however, Istanbul is an affectionate and informative work that has something in it both for Pamuk enthusiasts and for those who seek an understanding of a great historical centre (even though the book is unlikely to satisfy either group completely). And for a work that obsesses so much about melancholia and a forgotten past, it ends on a heartwarmingly forward-looking note: "I don’t want to be an artist," the young Orhan Pamuk tells his mother. "I’m going to be a writer."

Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and Kafka is funny!

Not that I’m any sort of expert on this topic, but I think Kafka-esque is an overused word, often applied to just about any noirish work of anxiety, and ignoring one of the most distinct elements of Franz K’s claustrophobic worlds: his very particular, absurdist black humour. Most of us don’t think of Kafka in especially funny terms. I think instinctively of a sallow-faced, sunken-cheeked man with a haunted expression, condemned to spend eternity in a drab office where nothing ever gets done. I think of Jeremy Irons (who played Kafka in Steven Soderbergh’s eponymous 1990 film; but I might have thought of Jeremy Irons even if that film had never been made). I think of the worried, tight-jawed Anthony Perkins (who had just come off playing Norman Bates when he starred in Orson Welles’ crepuscular The Trial in 1962).

But Kafka is also seriously funny. And Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is a novel more than worthy of being called Kafka-esque, capturing absurdism as well as it does tragedy. The protagonist, the poet Ka, is one of the genuinely unforgettable characters (another overused description) in recent fiction, a melancholy modern-day K wandering the streets of Kars in Turkey, caught in a crossfire between secular and fundamentalist Islamists.

Ka isn’t funny himself, but the events he’s embroiled in, and the people he encounters, are. The description of a meeting where extremists debate the contents of a televised message they want to send to the Western world is as brilliantly, morbidly comic as anything in The Trial. There is great beauty but also (intentional, I’m certain) great humour in the way poems keep coming to Ka during his time in Kars (he hasn’t written one for the four years previous), and how he often doesn’t even have the time or opportunity to note them down. And what about the timid, aging detective who is hired to follow Ka around the city. And the confused youngsters who start crying when they suspect that they might be atheists inside.

Snow is a book of great power. It’s beautiful in its imagery (especially in its use of snow, and the theatre) and profound in its observation of wasted lives and the ways in which people use religion as a crutch, continuing to cling to it past the point of belief simply because they have nothing else to cling to. But it’s somehow cuttingly funny about all these things too. It isn’t often you come across a book that manages to send up the absurdity of its characters’ actions while at the same time being gently empathetic towards them. This might seem to be a book about the shades of Islam (which is one reason it’s doing so well around the world) but it implicates all of us.

P.S. A few years ago, I saw a short film with the extraordinary title Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Richard E Grant as the harried writer seeking inspiration on a snowy Christmas night as, bedevilled by distractions, he tries to finish the first line of his new story: "Grigor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic... WHAT??" A banana? A kangaroo? It was a funny film. Franz K would have smiled. Even Jeremy Irons might have.