When I first started reading Orhan Pamuk's books I really struggledand ended up abandoning Snow and My Name Is Read!!!!!!!It just seemed to complex and I couldn't follow at all really.But after reading Museum Of Innocence I really enjoyed this bookand started to feel I was understanding this great writers work.Now I have finished Silent House....which I really loved!Now I really do want to go back and read his books that i have abandoned.Silent House just captivated me!The characters were really...

Sessiz Ev: roman = Silent House, Orhan Pamuk (1952)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. 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. Th...

The book was almost painful to read. A clash between the westernized intelligentsia and the nationalist poor, accompanied by sexual tensions, ends up in violence and death. Everybody wishes well, but everybody hurts everybody else. And upstairs stays a vicious traditionalist ninety-years old grandmother who rejects everything and everybody.

This book has a lot of characters to focus on which can make it tiring in the course of reading. For me, I wanted to hear more about Selahattin, his questionings and clashes and also Recep as well. The first 50 pages were more flowing for me (before the grandchildren got involved) and I found some of their personal stories “uninteresting.”There are memorable quotes in the book as well like “there’s no way to express history, or even life as it is, in words! the only solution would be to transfor...

"Silent House" is an early novel by Nobel recipient Orhan Pamuk. Compared to his more famous work, it is more straightforward than "My Name is Red", which harnesses its setting in early Ottoman Istanbul and its self-conscious virtuosity to a mystery that rarely seems to be the novelist's focus. "Silent House" shares the historical setting of "The Museum of Innocence", the politically-riven Turkey of the eighties. Nationalism is on the rise, and an Army coup is around the corner. But unlike "The

I don't know why I waited so long to revisit Orhan Pamuk! Both My Name is Red and Snow have stayed with me for many years. The conflicts of an extended family in Silent House mirror the political and social world of 1980 Turkey. Pamuk is especially brilliant at capturing the self-destructive psyche of the male cousins. A terrifying and sad novel.

I was a bit uncertain of the rating for this book. However, I landed on 4* out of 5 mostly because I rather enjoyed it. This despite the fact that the alternating voices, perspectives and even tenses were confusing at times. Most of the voices - there was never any warning - I could quickly and easily tell apart, but the two teenage boys, Metin and Hasan were a bit difficult every now and then. Purposely so, the translator tells me at the end of the book.Hasan and Metin are related, although the...

I must be missing something vital - in translation? in theme? Because this was the second book of Orhan Pamuk in as many weeks that I had zero (possibly negative) appreciation for. Granted, this is a translation of a very old book and Snow is a fairly recent graduate of the Pamuk alum. But, many of the themes that bothered me in Snow, bothered me here too. I'll come to that in a minute.Silent House is a story of a Turkish family headed by an old (highly loathsome) grandmother, Fatma. She's ill a...

I kind of hovered between rating this 3 and 4 stars, but I realized I was leaning towards 3 because I am completely ignorant of Turkish history and politics, and so not fair to penalize the author for my own gap....An interesting read which reminded me a little bit of Naguib Mahfouz's fiction. Pamuk gives us multiple narrators to tell us the story of Turkey and its 20th century struggles as the border state between Europe and the Muslim nations of the middle east. A pity that I don't know the hi...

Pamuk has tried to explore the conflicts between religious and secular, nationalist and communist of Turkey through the story of an old lady and her grandchildren. But this work lacks the depth with which Pamuk wrote Snow thirty years later with a similar theme. Characters in Snow express opinions to explain which ideology they belong to clearly. But the people of Silent House are just blasphemous to prove their secularity.

I liked this - almost as much as "The Museum of Innocence", which is still my favorite Orhan Pamuk novel.... but it's close. ( it's a smaller book - less 'dense' than other Pamuk books I've read-- each chapter is short). Right from the start the dialogue between the cranky old grandmother and Recep - her FRICKIN SLAVE HORSE -- a Saint to boot-is a dwarf.... making the visuals of the dialogue all the more hysterically crazy-funny....( shaking your head: "you've got to be kidding"). Recep is a bas...

i enjoyed this book tremendously. a few hours from instanbul, in what used to be country-side but is now a posh sea town, an elderly widow lives in a decrepit old house. the book is set in 1980 (though this date is never mentioned in the book; the book was published in 1983) and takes place during the days in which fatma’s grandchildren pay her their annual visit. the eldest is a university professor in history, the second oldest a university student and the youngest a high schooler. the narrati...

I spent several weeks reading Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House. Pamuk’s books are dense and difficult, but well worth the effort, if one measures this by those “aha” moments occasionally triggered by great literature.Silent House is Pamuk’s second novel, first published in 1983. On the surface, it’s the story of a single family. In her second floor room, in the old house in a seaside village where she has spent her adult life, a frail ninety year old widow awaits the annual visit of her three grandch

This is a very well written book with extremely real characters, but I can't say I enjoyed it. Appreciated maybe - It's a journey into nothingness and futility, anger spite & fear. I felt like I needed a wash afterwards. I found the Grandmother's vicious point of view particularly difficult to read. Almost as bleak as a Cormac McCarthy, but more believable - *shudders*. I read the drunken rage and rape driving scenes with a kind of fascinated horror, needing to put the book down but forced to go...

[Revised, pictures added, spoilers hidden 4/20/22]Turkey’s ongoing modernization, real estate boom, and politics provide the background for this story set in a small Turkish seaside city. We guess it’s around the 1970s. The book was originally published in Turkey in 1983. Three adult grandchildren make their obligatory annual summer visit to their 90-year-old grandmother. The grandmother is crotchety and demanding especially to her live-in servant whom she alternately calls “the dwarf” or “the b...

I always regret waiting so long to read the next Orhan pamuk book on my list! He never disappoints!This one is an absolute favourite (though nothing beats Museum of Innocence, and Snow) .... He takes the reader to a tumultuous time in the History of modern Turkey, rich n human bound depiction of the cultural and identity crisis that permeates the nation's minds and souls represented by an obsessive dr working for decades on an encyclopedia that he means to use a tool to awaken his "sleeping" com...

A history of a Turkish family; a melancholic journey through the past and present; reflections on life, love and hate, death and God. A story about utter loneliness."You can’t start out again in life, that’s a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before, in o...

Originally published in Turkey in 1983 and now translated into English for the first time, Silent House (Knopf) is Orhan Pamuk's second novel. Although the Nobel Prize-winner makes no direct mention of the historical relevance of the book in the text itself, his story takes place roughly one month before the September 12, 1980 Turkish coup d'état, in which the Chief of the General Staff General Kenan Evren and the Turkish Armed Forces restored order after violence had broken out between right-le...

‘Silent House’ by Orhan Pamuk follows multiple individuals who reside in a small town outside of Istanbul; there is the matriarchal grandmother whose narrative constantly interweaves the past with the present, her past forming the crux of her existence. Haunted by the loss of her husband, her obsession with her past causes her to become cantankerous to those round her as she prepares for the coming visit of her grand-children. In a polar opposite to their grand-mother, her grand-children are app...

Sleepless nights are what this novel granted me - thank you very much, Orhan Pamuk! Not to be misunderstood: This is a masterpiece dealing with family drama in which Pamuk has yet again proved his exceptional, structured and picturesque writing style. The novel blatantly exposes us to political and religious differences spanning over decades in a family and its surrounding in a transformational culture & country. This story has a huge impact on me for many reasons, but was it a coincidence that