A Turkish Great Expectations

Orhan Pamuk's newly released novel Silent House is really his second novel.

The Guardian speculates that it wasn't released in the West in 1983 (year of its publication in Turkish) because back then Pamuk may have been considered as a parochial--too Turkish for Western consumption--writer.

But then he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 and rocketed into becoming cosmopolitan and "universal" overnight.

Yet in a review of the novel the NYT compares the novel to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The reviewer describes Fatma, the protagonist-matriarch of the novel as a

Turkish Miss Havisham, embittered and trapped in the past, haunting the decaying mansion outside Istanbul where she lives alone with her servant, a dwarf who also happens to be her late husband's illegitimate child.

The review doesn't see anything particularly "Turkish" in the novel. On the contrary, a Western spirit seems to pervade it.

In the vein of Virginia Woolf, Pamuk displays an interest in the consciousness, though he renders the consciousness "

not as a series of thoughts broadcast out into the ozone, like Mrs. Dalloway's but as an imaginary conversation with a specific person who never answers.

Fatma can never forgive her husband and constantly argues with her dead spouse and it's this fight with an unavailable or disinterested interlocutor that makes up the spine of the novel's plot.