topics: |  fiction | turkey | islam

	Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a
	concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about
	to speak of very ugly matters.
	   - lines from Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), quoted
	     in the front matter.

Orhan Pamuk, the narrator, appears as a character in Snow, addressed as
"Orhan".  The story of the poet Ka's visit to the border town of Kars
unfolds in the narrative frame of being told by the novelist Orhan, four
years after the incidents in the story.  Occasionally the narrative will
move forward, hinting at events to come in the author's special omniscient
voice, thus keeping the suspense alive.

At one point, the character Blue, who emerges as one of the strongest
delineations in the book, is telling a story to Ka. Suddenly he steps
off the story to describe how he feels at this point in the narrative, and
then gradually Blue gets increasingly involved in the story.  This seems to
be a favourite ploy with Pamuk.

Many incidents, such as the murder of the director of the Education
institute, may have been modeled on real events.  Two years after Snow, see murder of [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrant_Dink|Hrant Drink]).

Excerpts

Like those Chekhovian characters so laden with virtue that they never
know success in life - full of melancholy. 4

Ka, you see, was one of those moralists who believe that the greatest joy
comes from never oding anything for the sake of personal happiness. 23

Inventing the future

There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens; they
fear us not because we are journalists but because we can predict the
future. 29

	[Ka finds a news item being printed, describing an event - a play to
	be staged later, in which he is given a role of reading out a poem
	called "Snow" which he has not written]

the pleasure of the child who knows death is too far off to imagine. 34

--
  "What did you do while you were in Frankfurt?"
  "I'd think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write... I masturbated"

Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent.
The issue is the same for all real poets. If you have been happy too long,
you become banal.  By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time,
you lose your poetic powers... Happiness and poetry can coexist only for the
briefest time." Ipek and Ka, 129

"Unlike you, I am not afraid of life or my passions." Necip to Ka, 144

The word atheist comes from the Greek word athos.  But that word doesn't
refer to people who don't believe in God: it refers to the lonely ones, the
people whom the gods have abandoned. 145

Romance

"Impatient men like you don't fall in love with a woman, they take possession
of her." Kadife to Ka, 225

For Ka, who had not made love in four years, it felt like a miracle.  So,
even as he succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, his conscious mind was
reminding him what a beautiful moment this was. Just as with his first sexual
experiences, it was not so much the act as the thought of making love that
occupied him.  For a while, this protected him from overexcitement.  Details
from the pornographic films to which he'd become addicted in Frankfurt rushed
through his head, creating a poetic aura that seemed beyond logic.  ... So it
was not Ipek herself who was arousing Ka but pornographic imagery, and the
miracle was less her presence than the fact that he could imagine his fantasy
here in bed with him.  254

I am very happy now.  I have no desire to play the hero.
Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy.  316

You are the slave of the ruthless Europeans and like all true slaves, you
don't even know you're a slave.  You're just a typical little European from
Nisantas: not only were you brought up to look down on your own traditions,
you think you live on a higher plane than ordinary people. 331

It doesn't matter where you live -- here, or in your beloved Europe -- you'll
always be imitating them; you'll always be grovelling. 357

People who seek only happiness never find it. Blue to Ka 357

review by Margaret Atwood: "Headscarves To Die For"

Margaret Atwood, New York Times, August 15, 2004

This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an
engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times.

In Turkey, Pamuk is the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist
and political pundit: the Turkish public reads his novels as if taking its
own pulse. He is also highly esteemed in Europe: his sixth novel, the lush
and intriguing ''My Name Is Red,'' carried off the 2003 Impac Dublin Literary
Award, adding to his long list of prizes.

He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as
his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of ''Westernization''
and those of the Islamists. Although it's set in the 1990's and was begun
before Sept. 11, ''Snow'' is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of
fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and
conspiracies and violence it depicts.

Like Pamuk's other novels, ''Snow'' is an in-depth tour of the divided,
hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul. It's the story of Ka, a gloomy
but appealing poet who hasn't written anything in years. But Ka is not his
own narrator: by the time of the telling he has been assassinated, and his
tale is pieced together by an ''old friend'' of his who just happens to be
named Orhan.

As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has
returned to Istanbul after 12 years for his mother's funeral. He's making his
way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm
begins. (Kar is ''snow'' in Turkish, so we have already been given an
envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist
interested in the recent murder of the city's mayor and the suicides of a
number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves,
but this is only one of his motives. He also wants to see Ipek, a beautiful
woman he'd known as a student. Divorced from a onetime friend of Ka's turned
Islamist politician, she lives in the shabby Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka is
staying.

Cut off from escape by the snow, Ka wanders through a decaying city haunted
by its glorious former selves: there are architectural remnants of the once
vast Ottoman Empire; the grand Armenian church stands empty, testifying to
the massacre of its worshipers; there are ghosts of Russian rulers and their
lavish celebrations, and pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic
and instigator of a ruthless ''modernization'' campaign, which included --
not incidentally -- a ban on headscarves.

Ka's pose as a journalist allows Pamuk to put on display a wide variety of
opinions. Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find
it hard to imagine the mix of resentful entitlement (We ought to be
powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and
anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of
headroom in such places, and thus in ''Snow.''

Ka tries to find out more about the dead girls but encounters resistance:
he's from a bourgeois background in cosmopolitan Istanbul, he's been in exile
in the West, he has a snazzy overcoat. Believers accuse him of atheism; the
secular government doesn't want him writing about the suicides -- a blot on
its reputation -- so he's dogged by police spies; common people are
suspicious of him. He's present in a pastry shop when a tiny fundamentalist
gunman murders the director of the institute that has expelled the headscarf
girls. He gets mixed up with his beloved's former husband, the two of them
are arrested and he witnesses the brutality of the secularist regime. He
manages to duck his shadowers long enough to meet with an Islamist extremist
in hiding, the persuasive Blue, said to be behind the director's murder. And
so he goes, floundering from encounter to encounter.

In ''Snow,'' translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and
gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town's newspaper publisher,
Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem
''Snow.'' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called ''Snow'' and
is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ''Don't be so
sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it
happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them
up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'' And sure enough,
inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he's been in
years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ''Snow.'' Before you
know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a
ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ''My Fatherland or My
Head Scarf.'' As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide
to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience.

The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness,
the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night
prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile -- these are
vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape. A case
could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace
its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include
Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the
Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly
men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's
probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling
nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a
man would.

Women -- except as idealized objects of desire -- have not been of notably
central importance in Pamuk's previous novels, but ''Snow'' is a
departure. There are two strong female characters, the emotionally battered
Ipek and her sister, the stubborn actress Kadife. In addition, there's a
chorus: the headscarf girls. Those scrapping for power on both sides use
these dead girls as symbols, having put unbearable pressure on them while
they were alive. Ka, however, sees them as suffering human beings. ''It
wasn't the elements of poverty or helplessness that Ka found so
shocking. Neither was it the constant beatings to which these girls were
subjected, or the insensitivity of fathers who wouldn't even let them go
outside, or the constant surveillance of jealous husbands. The thing that
shocked and frightened Ka was the way these girls had killed themselves:
abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday
routines.''

Their suicides are like the other brutal events in the novel: sudden
eruptions of violence thrown up by relentless underlying forces.

The attitudes of men toward women drive the plot in ''Snow,'' but even more
important are the attitudes of men toward one another. Ka is always worrying
about whether other men respect or despise him, and that respect hinges not
on material wealth but on what he is thought to believe. Since he himself
isn't sure, he vacillates from one side to another. Shall he stick with the
Western enlightenment? But he was miserable in Germany. Shall he return to
the Muslim fold? But despite his drunken hand-kissing of a local religious
leader, he can't fit in.

If Ka were to run true to the form of Pamuk's previous novels, he might take
refuge in stories. Stories, Pamuk has hinted, create the world we perceive:
instead of ''I think, therefore I am,'' a Pamuk character might say, ''I am
because I narrate.'' It's the Scheherazade position, in spades. But poor
murdered Ka is no novelist: it's up to ''Orhan'' to act as his Horatio.

''Snow'' is the latest entry in Pamuk's longtime project: narrating his
country into being. It's also the closest to realism. Kars is finely drawn,
in all its touching squalor, but its inhabitants resist ''Orhan's''
novelizing of them. One of them asks him to tell the reader not to believe
anything he says about them, because ''no one could understand us from so far
away.'' This is a challenge to Pamuk and his considerable art, but it is also
a challenge to us.

blurb:
Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt
and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this
masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and
travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a
wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their
head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now
recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds
himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic
terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening
climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything
else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of
immense relevance to our present moment.

--Ramifications

The Turkish book, Kar, was published in 2002.  Five years later, in an echo of
events in Snow, his friend, the editor of the newspaper Agos, Hrant Dink
was shot dead.  In the words ofRobert Fisk

     20 January 2007: Hrant Dink became the 1,500,001st victim of the
     Armenian genocide yesterday. An educated and generous journalist and
     academic - editor of the weekly Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos - he
     tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common
     narrative of the 20th century's first holocaust. And he paid the price:
     two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in
     the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon.

     The 53-year-old journalist, who had two children, was murdered at the
     door of his newspaper. Just over a year ago, he was convicted under
     Turkey's notorious law 301 of "anti-Turkishness", a charge he
     strenuously denied even after he received a six-month suspended sentence
     from an Istanbul court.

Subsequently, one of the suspects in the murder threatened Pamuk:

     Turkish murder suspect warns Nobel's Pamuk
     24 Jan 2007 By Daren Butler and Paul de Bendern

     ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A key suspect in the murder of Turkish Armenian
     editor Hrant Dink, whose funeral attracted 100,000 people, issued a
     warning on Wednesday to Nobel Literature Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.

     Yasin Hayal, handcuffed and escorted by police under heavy security
     shouted "Orhan Pamuk should be careful" as he was taken to an Istanbul
     court house over the killing of Dink last Friday.

     Hayal, a known nationalist militant, served 11 months in jail for the
     2004 bombing of a McDonald's restaurant in his home town Trabzon on the
     Black Sea. He has admitted to inciting his friend Ogun Samast, 17, to
     kill Dink.

Thus, Pamuk himself is in no small way part of the traditionalist-modernist
conflict that is the theme of Snow.