Joudat Bey and his sons | Orhan Pamuk

An epic novel that monitors the political, economic, and social changes in Turkey during the twentieth century across the successive generations of the Goudet Bey family, the first with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, the second with Ataturk's death at the end of the thirties, and the third with the military coup in the seventies. When Pamuk was asked about the similarity between "Goudet Bey and his sons" and Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy, he replied, "I think I share with Mahfouz the relationships of the characters with the place, and the writing of the neighborhoods and streets, and the casual conversations and conspiracies told by women. But the matter is more general than that; I am concerned with the transformation of large families' lives, where they coexist as if they were a unified group, then the family disintegrates from the traditional wooden house to scattered residences in a single building... All this forms my fictional world, which perhaps resembles Mahfouz's, but also differs from it."