Joudat Pasha and his sons

A monumental novel that chronicles the political, economic, and social changes in Turkey during the twentieth century across successive generations in the family of Goudet Bek, the first with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, the second with the death of Ataturk 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 Bek and his sons" and Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy, he replied, "I think I share with Mahfouz the relationships of the characters with the place, the writing of 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 separate residences within a unified building... All of this shapes my fictional world, which may resemble Mahfouz's, but also differs from it."