The Silent House (novel)
The Silent House (1983) is Orhan Pamuk's second novel published after Cevdet Bey and His Sons. The novel tells the story of a week in which 3 siblings go to visit their grandmother in Cennethisar, a small town near Istanbul.
The Silent House consists of 32 chapters. Each chapter is narrated from a different narrator's point of view in the first person. The names of the five narrators in the novel in turn are Recep, Buyukhanim, Hasan, Faruk and Metin. The narrator of the opening chapter is Recep and the narrator of the closing chapter is Buyukhanim. Each of the narrators has a different number of chapters to tell. Hasan has eight, Buyukhanim seven, Recep six, Faruk six, and Metin has five chapters. The distribution of the chapters to the narrators are as following:
Place: Cennethisar
Time: July 1980. The Silent House takes place just one month before the military coup of September 12 in Turkey. Therefore, the novel carries the influence of the great political tension.
Behcet Necatigil summarizes the plot of the novel: One of the five narrators of The Silent House, historian Faruk does some research on Ottoman History in an archive in Gebze which is a small town near Istanbul.
Related Sources:
Orhan Pamuk's observations about the novel are very significant in terms of the novel's analysis. All of the quotation are taken from the first edition of his book "The Other Colors" in which he brings his various writings together.
• Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature
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