I've passed the half-way point and decided to re-read the preface and research its background. I was intrigued by the post from desertblues that Faruk and his sister were characters from another book,
Silent House. I wanted to understand what the connection was. Here's a summary of the key points I found about this novel and links to a few websites with further details. Beware of spoilers if you plan to read this book someday!
Silent House was published in 1983. It is set in the summer of 1980, a period of simmering political tensions in Turkey. In Sept would occur the third military coup in the history of the Turkish Republic. Three years of marshal law followed, and 500,000 people were arrested.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_..._d%27%C3%A9tat
The novel chronicles the decline of three generations of the Darvinoglu family from the early 20th century to 1980. Their story is told in first-person stream of consciousness (very Faulkner-esque) with each chapter rotating amongst various family members.
The location is the beach-town of Cennethisar. It was a sleepy fishing village and remote from Istanbul when the patriach of the family (Grandfather Selahattin) was exiled here by a Young Turk for his radical republican politics in the early century. By 1980 it is a luxury beach resort for the nation's Westernized capitalist elite.
The novel revolves around the one-week visit to the 90-year old matriach (Grandmother Fatma) by her three grandchildren from Istanbul - an annual obligatory visit rather than one motivated by love. They are Faruk (oldest), Metin and Nilgun. There is an illegitimate fourth relative, Hasan, who is a central character of the story.
The novel is Pamuk's "meditation on the impact of the coup on his homeland." Each grandchild represents a different political movement.
Faruk - Secular Republicanism
Metin - Neo-liberalism, wants to move to America
Nilgun - Communism
Hasan - Fascism, Ultra-Nationalism
Some major themes of the novel are:
1) Each generation pays for the previous generation's "inability to reconcile their imperial past with their modern aspirations to be citizens of Europe"
2) The past is never dead no matter how much one modernizes. Tradition continues. A central question of the book is "What is time?"
3) Feelings of inferiority to the West
The Grandfather represents historic Turkish progressivism. Several details of his life mirror Ataturk's. He is consumed by a passion to write an all-encompassing encyclopedia of Western scientific knowledge (sounds very Middlemarch!). He says in the novel:
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When I've finished my 48-volume encyclopedia of all the basic principles and ideas, everything that must be said in the East will have been said once and for all.
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Faruk is the oldest grandchild in his mid-30s. A professor of history. Divorced. Mostly he sits around Fatma's table wallowing with a bottle of alcohol. He searches the government archives in Gebze looking for meaning in the Ottoman manuscripts. He becomes obsessed to write "a book with no beginning and no end". His book's purpose will be:
Quote:
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to encompass, with no attention to relative value or importance, every piece of information I could discover about Gebze and its environs in [the seventeenth] century . . . I won’t let a single document escape my eye, every single event will take its place, one by one. Someone reading my book from cover to cover will during those weeks and months end up able to glimpse that cloudlike mass of events that I managed to perceive while working here, and like me he’ll murmur excitedly: This is history, this is history and life . . .
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Nilgun, Faruk's sister, is the only sibling who really cares about politics and has real compassion for the lower classes. She is a university student and represents the potential for a bright future of the family and reversal of the family's decline. Hasan, the fascist thug who hangs with the local gang terrorizing the town citizens, falls in love with her. Somehow this results in the tragic fate of her death.
Here are a few websites where I gleaned this information.
http://quarterlyconversation.com/sil...by-orhan-pamuk
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-cultu...sh-novel#page1