Silent House – Orhan Pamuk (Translated by Robert Finn)
In an old mansion in Cennethisar (formerly a fishing village, now a posh resort near Istanbul) the old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren: Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun; and the younger grandson, Metin, a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. The widow has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf–and the doctor’s illegitimate son. Mistress and servant share memories, and grievances, of those early years. But it is Recep’s cousin Hassan, a high school dropout, and fervent right-wing nationalist, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm, in this spell-binding novel depicting Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.
Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother–her only family–is hazardous. But she doesn’t have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have a normal life.
Convicted murderer and drug baron Yusuf Kaya has escaped from Istanbul prison. He appears to have had inside help…
I have always been a reader, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a book in my hand, reading anything and everything I came across – even newspapers wrapped around purchases! Growing up in India in the eighties, there were not many opportunities to read books, unless you had access to well equipped libraries or had relatives who were willing to buy and bring back books from the west. So most people depended on school libraries with public libraries being more of a joke than anything else…I used to haunt my school and college libraries, so much that I used to use up my quota of books and then ask/beg friends to lend me theirs too.
Coming to Singapore and then finding out about the library system here was akin to water to a thirsty man in a desert! Initially I used a family member’s card and then quickly got mine done as well. When BB & GG were born, I only waited two weeks before I went and got their own library cards. We’ve been borrowing books since then. GG loved reading right from the begining, but BB took a bit of time to start reading fiction. His choice of books were restricted to non-fiction, especially those relating to cars, trains and planes! His reading choices have improved a lot these days though!
I guess smartphones and other digital distractions have been a big contributors to this decline. I can see this even in GG & BB. Even though we regularly go to the library and borrow books, their phones still seem to have a stronger pull than books. Sometimes I have to take away their phones and get them to read instead. I don’t emphasise physical books, even an e-book is better than not reading at all!
Sacred India is a close-focus view of spirituality in India with a very God-is-in-the-details approach. Lonely Planet tackles a bafflingly large subject with admirable grace in this loosely structured, accessibly sized coffee-table book. A florid painting of Ganesh, a hundred capped heads bowed in prayer, weather-beaten flags whipped in the Himalayan wind: all are diverse glimpses of India’s spiritual cultures. India’s four major religions–Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism–are gathered in an impressionistic collage of vibrant photos and text. Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, as well as tribal religions and gurus are also covered in smaller sections. The book’s photos are lavish in color and pungently evocative–but decidedly not opulent. They excel at the intensely personal (a lotus flower, a turban-swathed camel trader, a Muslim woman reading the Quran), but their zoomed-in style sometimes falls short of capturing the sense of awe and grandeur we like to associate with religion. Sacred India offers brief glimpses of a wide-ranging and multicolored land; but unlike the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the picture formed in the mind’s eye from these richly textured details will be greater than the sum of its parts.
