Like his grandson to come, he took to drink. His own grandchildren do seem to be the rationalist marvels that he envisioned. Enlightenment is theirs by natural inheritance. They don't have to torture themselves to think secular thoughts. The lonely beach town is nowadays filled with prosperous concrete houses.
German tourists throng the hotel wearing fezes and watching belly dancers.
Everyone is steeped in problems. The ferocious battles between tradition and change go on as before, except in the useless violent form of rival gangs and killings, Communists versus fascists. The conundrums of East and West are not looking good. From the preface to The White Castle we discover that poor old Faruk, the boozy historian, who had quite enough troubles in The House of Silence, seems to have more, and has been expelled from the university. We are reminded that his young sister has died, not from natural causes either, as we know from the other novel, and we bite our fingernails over the fate of modernity and the East-even while we are supposed to be settling down for the story to come.