The voices
of six main characters narrate alternate chapters in the beautifully structured
counterpoint of this novel (akin to the structure of modern novels by Virginia
Woolf or William Faulkner). This work is the second of Pamuk’s ten books but is
only now translated. The novel’s characters are members of a fading bourgeois
Turkish family. It is the summer of 1980, when deadly clashes between fascist
and communist paramilitary groups flared in Turkey; the novel explores the forces
in Turkish society which cause such violence and yield the military coup at the end of 1980.
The youngest
of Pamuk’s six narrators is Hasan, a confused, resentful teenaged cousin who
rages against society and belongs to a fascist youth group. He acts out in ways
which violently affect his well-off cousins and propel him toward a menacing
destiny in Istanbul. “All our country’s sorrows,” he ends by saying, “are on
account of some bastards who just enjoy playing with us, but one day I’m going
to make fun out of their games. I don’t know yet what it is that I’m going to
do, but…Watch out for me from now on!” (324-5)
The family
which cousin Hasan’s actions tragically affect is made up of a leftist sister –
Nilgun, a lovely college student – and her two brothers (one is a teenager, and
the other is an alcoholic historian in his thirties, who plays a role at the
start of Pamuk’s third novel, The White
Hotel). The rest of this enmeshed family consists of the aged grandmother,
Fatma, and her perceptive, compassionate housekeeper, a dwarf, who is the illegitimate
son of the late grandfather yet “tries to take care of everybody.” (305) The three grandchildren are visiting their
grandmother’s home, which has served them since childhood as an alluring, summer
beach house near Istanbul.
Fatma,
ninety and frail, is vigilant about behavior in her household yet unable even to
know what happens there. Feeling trapped at night in the upstairs bedroom of
the silent house, she thinks often of death and especially about her deceased
husband, a bitterly disappointed intellectual who never completed his
enlightened skeptic’s encyclopedia and whose starkly secular voice haunts her
reveries and much of the novel: “we all sink into Nothingness, Fatma;…you decay
down to the last strand of hair, with no right even to hope of coming back
again.” (297)
At the core
of this novel’s power are the moments of existential self-confrontation
experienced by the six vivid narrating characters, and particularly by Fatma, who is haunted by her late husband – this
cranky, nearly voiceless old woman to whom Pamuk gives a voice. Analyzed almost unto death by her late husband, she feels her
interior life spill helplessly out of her, enraged and excoriated: “it’s as
though my outside has become my inside and my inside my outside, and in the
dark I can’t figure out which one I am.” (331)
The grandchild
who most shares Fatma’s alarmed self-awareness is the historian in his
thirties, Faruk. And his crisis arises partly from his doubt about writing
history. He has come to see the writing of history as pure storytelling, in his
time and place in Turkey and not only there (for, of course, corrupting
deception and self-deception exist not only in Asia Minor). Faruk’s
self-consciousness about what he does is shared by Pamuk himself, and
the works of this great novelist – for example, My Name Is Red and Snow –
become increasingly ambitious in content and narrative experiment. These
wonderful novels are invariably filled with moving characters like Fatma,
Faruk, and even dangerous Hasan, who struggle to fabricate their identities in
the midst of a collapsing society and, so, to “make sense of the world by means
of tales.” (165)
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