Seven Houses
Page 27
“Yes, I understand, mother.”
“I cannot leave Maria behind either.”
“Yes, of course.”
“She’ll live with me full time now. It’s my duty. I must abide by it.”
And Maria? It didn’t matter to her all that much whether she went to Istanbul to live with her daughter, to America, or the moon. Amber had invited her to live here but Maria had refused—too full of associations. “It’s an İpekçi house, not a Taşpinar,” she’d said. Nothing could replace the turquoise cottage, her well, and the ghost of her husband who left her a hundred kuruş every night by the gardenias. Maria, who lived in a lost century with her spirits and entered that realm every day, who had never really crossed into this age. Who kept returning to a time that existed only in her memory.
She’d asked Amber what it was like to fly in an airplane. “Is it turbulent? Does it shake? Does it shake violently in the air?”
“No,” Amber had told her, “it doesn’t shake at all. You don’t even know you’re moving. It’s a very smooth ride. Like floating in a cayique on a calm day but instead you are moving in the sky. You look out the window and see the clouds below you. Then, the door opens and you’re in a different place far away.”
“The way death must feel.”
“Your bath is ready,” Nellie called out. “You sure you want to do this? You may get pneumonia.”
“You sound like my mother,” Amber smiled.
“Well, we’re kinda related, you know.”
Amber sat in front of the worn marble sink and poured a pitcher of cold water over her shoulders. Goosebumps spread all over her flesh. How lucky am I to have choices, she thought. How lucky.
The muezzin’s voice rose in the air. The nightingale sang a song of acceptance. A bus went by.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In parts of Turkey, where I spent my childhood, the birds were believed to be spirits. My parents told me that my grandmother had become a nightingale after she died.
A few years ago, on a Christmas morning, I went into my study to write something new. I stared at the emptiness of the white paper for a long time. My mind was blank. I had nothing to say, as if a “bird had eaten my tongue.” I was looking out of the enormous picture window at the rolling hills with ancient oaks, when from out of nowhere, a bird came flying directly toward me, crashed with an enormous thud, and died instantly.
It was still warm when I found it, a small falcon that I identified as a merlin, not a bird indigenous to Northern California where I live. Neither was this place on its migratory pattern.
The bird’s death had aroused a great deal of emotion and I cried. I looked again at the emptiness of the white paper and suddenly words and tales came to life, flowing with unusual ease. I stayed in the room for a week and wrote ceaselessly. When I came out on the first day of the New Year, I had several pads full of words, the first draft of a novel.
Among the letters awaiting me was one from my mother who lives in Ankara. She said this was the most difficult letter of her life. My father had died unexpectedly of a heart attack in the late afternoon on Christmas day. He was sitting at his desk, drafting a letter to me. My mother had preferred to write than to call me to break the news, in order to retard the grief.
My father had died when the merlin had crashed itself against my window. Who is to know if this was merely a coincidence, or for that matter what coincidences really are?
The pads were put in a drawer to remain there untouched for seven years. When I finally had the courage to read them, they grew into Seven Houses.
I wish I’d been able to share this book with him. But then, perhaps, it might never have been written. Every book is a great collaboration and for this one I credit my grandmothers Maria and Zehra, Grandpapa Hamid, Uncle Aladdin, Aunt Ayhan, and, of course, my parents, Sadri and Yümniye, for giving me the yarns to spin.
For other writers and friends who encouraged me—Suzanne Lipsett, Vicky Doubleday, Nancy Van Norman Baer, Joan Baribault, Isabel Allende, Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, Kathryn Neville, Fatema Mernissi, Angie Thieriot, Carol Tarlow, Tracy Bernstein, my agents Bonnie Nadell and Jane Judd, my publisher Judith Curr and editor Rosemary Ahern, and many other kind people who remain behind the scenes, whose names remain unknown.
Thanks to Josh and Patty for being in my life and, as always, to Robert who is still stoking the fire, writing the love notes, and making the coffee.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find interesting angles and topics for discussion for Alev Lytle Croutier’s Seven Houses. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
A Conversation with Alev Lytle Croutier
Q: The sweeping family epic is a challenging novel to undertake. Why did you choose to do so?
A: If I ever realized how challenging a novel ahead of me was going to be, I’d be reluctant to begin any book. I started Seven Houses because I was deeply moved to describe an afternoon in my hundred-year-old grandmother’s garden in Izmir. That story began clustering with other scenes with other family members, and then the fictional characters attached themselves, and soon I had a great tangle, a chaotic mélange of story and history. I think it’s that point, the point of the tangling from which the novels are born, the point where one’s embellished memory merges with a nonexisting fictional world. And the writer’s task is to untangle.
Q: Did you know before you began this novel that you would write from the point of view of the houses? Were there challenges in having the houses act as characters?
A: It came later, somewhere in the middle. I felt something was missing but didn’t know what. Then, I had the flash, alone in a hotel room. I have an obsession with houses. Buildings, rooms, gardens, ruins ignite my imagination more than anything else. I’m sensitive to the spirit of a “place” or lack of it. I’m aware that the walls witness our most private moments, moments concealed from everyone else. The walls are the ultimate voyeurs (as are most writers), therefore a great literary device for expressing a point of view. “If the walls could talk,” so they do. One of my European editors said to me, “But Alev, houses don’t talk.” Literally they don’t, of course. But this is a point of view that allowed me to stay in the precinct of one house at a time, the constraint of one place, like a steady camera recording the incidents as in cinema verité. The inherent challenges were the unity of the place. Everything had to occur within the vicinity of the houses. This constraint liberated me in a sense to explore the interior world of the characters through an objective lens.
Q: The magical realism that you inject into your writing is reminiscent of authors like Isabel Allende, while your grand sense of time and place brings to mind authors like Salman Rushdie. What writers have inspired you?
A: García Márquez used to claim he never made it up but merely related what people believed was happening. I grew up in Turkey at a time when superstition and magic were still a prevalent part of the society. People talked about ghosts and communicating with the dead, told coffee fortunes, wore evil-eye charms, and some believed in birds or other creatures being spirits. This atmosphere was compounded with the literature I read, transcendentalists like Nizami, Rumi, and Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. But then, there was my Western education and rational conversion. I was enchanted with the nineteenth-century French writers like Balzac, Flaubert, Nerval, and Loti, and also Henry James. Among the more contemporary writers, I admire García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Alessandro Baricco, Salman Rushdie, Naguib Mahfuz, Tahar Ben Jelleun, AS Byatt, John Irving, Paul Auster, Ian McEwan, Renate Dorrestein, Gail Jones, Graham Joyce (this question always terrifies me, knowing I’m leaving out some really crucial writers’ names). I go through phases and often it’s not the body of work of someone but one special book that I fall in love with.
Q: While many of the people in your novel seem distanced from the reader, Amber appears to be a warmer, more fleshed
out character. Was this a conscious decision on your part?
A: Yes, Amber is the architect of the novel. The houses are constructed out of her imagination and express her point of view. She is the only character who appears in all of the seven houses. She is the real protagonist. She is the one who leaves the past that has oppressed the other women. At the end of the novel, she tells her daughter, “We are lucky to have choices,” which is a key to the novel—that she has created a life that allows her (and her daughter) more freedom of choice; therefore, her return to her native land becomes a choice, a reconciliation.
Q: Why did you choose to use the chapter opening quotes? Are there themes that one might pull from the larger works from which they were excerpted to better understand this novel?
A: The opening quote from Pierre Loti sets up the rhythm of the novel—that it will have no car chases, no wild sex scenes, but it will be like a slow camel ride on an infinite desert, like an opium dream. I like my readers to read at a slow pace and contemplate the imagery so that they make up their own opinions rather than accepting mine. Sort of an interactive element—since we don’t live in a very reflective society. In a way those quotes capsulate each chapter. The quote from Attar’s Conference of the Birds, for example, is a way of stating that there is a fabulist tradition in which the birds talk. It’s not a derivation but a redefinition. The Medea quote sets up the emotional landscape of the prodigal daughter.
Q: On page 225 Aida tells Amber, “Everyone sees things with different eyes. Just make up any old story. Doesn’t have to match mine or theirs, does it?” Do you consider this to be a central theme in your novel—that truth is subjective?
A: Truth is subjective, yet I do believe in the eternal verities. It’s about perspective. I’m attracted to dichotomy, paradox, and chance. Kismet is a big deal that defies cause and effect. What if the dramatic drive of stories is determined by “fate” more than intellect? That’s what I’m looking for.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. The author makes an interesting choice in telling the story through the eyes of the homes in which the characters live. In what ways do the seven houses as characters help facilitate concepts of place and setting in a very immediate way? How does architecture reflect progress and a world caught between tradition and modernization? What is the significance of the fact that Amber becomes an architect?
2. On page 11, our first narrator, the house in Smyrna, states, “I listen and peer into their lives—the most private moments when they close their doors and retreat into their private dreams. . . . I read their thoughts. Make judgments. Even manipulate situations when I can. I, too, have frailties.” Talk about how the houses act as living, breathing characters within the story. Do they, in fact, manipulate situations and help guide the lives of the people who live in them? Do you see each of the seven houses as having different personalities? Is there one house in particular that seems to affect the lives of the characters most?
3. In the same vein, how might the houses actually distance us from the inner thoughts and feelings of each character? Why might that be something that the author was trying to do?
4. Discuss the use of magical realism in this story. What are some of the tools used by the author to seamlessly incorporate fantastical moments—the moth that hatches out of amber, the local boy who turns into a werewolf—with the day-to-day life of reality that the characters inhabit?
5. How did the chapter opening quotes help to inform your reading of the story?
6. Amber tells Nellie what her teenage years were like in Turkey, describing how she and her friends rejected the traditional world of their elders, “seeking role models in fan magazines and comic books and Hollywood musicals.” What is America emblematic of to the characters in this novel? Are any of the characters free from the Western influence of movies, soda, and progress?
7. Are any of the characters successful in breaking free from where and what they come from? In what ways does the past stick with people despite their attempts to break free of it? How does the past seem to become etched in places and objects?
8. For the people in Seven Houses, social mores and codes of behavior often overpower familial attachment, personal desire, and loyalties. And while many of the characters struggle with their desire to be individually fulfilled in spite of these rules, very few succeed. Why do you think this pressure is such a tangible, consuming force in this novel? What, as a society, do they stand to lose by wayward behavior? Does anyone successfully escape from these strict rules?
9. Discuss the discrepancy between what is expected of women in this novel and what is expected of men in terms of how one must behave, look, and act. Are women held to a higher standard? If so, why?
10. Do you think Seven Houses ends on a positive note? Why or why not?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEV LYTLE CROUTIER is the only Turkish woman to be published in as many as twenty countries. She is the author of the novel The Palace of Tears and two works of nonfiction, Harem: The World Behind the Veil and Taking the Waters. She has also written and directed films, including Tell Me a Riddle, based on a novella by Tillie Olsen. Born and raised in Turkey, Croutier lives in San Francisco and Paris.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Alev Lytle Croutier
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-4413-2
0-7434-4414-0 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-4928-1 (eBook)
Photo credits: Cem Ener
Cover design by Royce M. Becker
Author photograph by Jerry Bauer
First Washington Square Press trade paperback edition September 2003
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