Snow (2004)
Orhan Pamuk (1952)
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
464 pages
When considering a corner of the world far from our own it can be difficult to avoid falling into simplistic assumptions, such as lumping the people of that place together as being largely similar to one another, or feeling an air of superiority over their particular culture and customs. At the end of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow --- set in the far-eastern Turkish town of Kars --- one of the characters confronts the story’s narrator with exactly this concern, saying:
“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”Other characters in the story express similar sentiments, as the townspeople of Kars recognize and repudiate the stereotypes, as well as condescension and pity, with which they feel they are viewed by the intellectual elite in the far-off capital of Istanbul, and, in a more amorphous, regional sense, by people in the West.
“But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel,” I said.
“Oh, yes, they do,” he cried. “If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.” (462)
Pamuk addresses these quite reasonable fears by creating a wonderfully intricate and compelling view of the complexity of life in distant Kars. He refers to the book on a website dedicated to his work as his “first and last political novel,” and, befitting its setting near the eastern Turkish border, the story involves secular leftists, Turkish nationalists, Islamists, Kurdish separatists, and the haunting remnants of the past presence of Armenians and Russians. In addition, there are all manner of citizens sympathizing to various degrees with one or another of these groups.
Few, if any, of the characters in the novel, however, present simple, easily stereotyped lives. Even the most fundamentalist of these characters, be they secular or religious, find themselves at times besieged by doubts about their beliefs, or find their desire to hold to their convictions challenged by humanist concerns such as love and friendship. In this way, the novel provides a compelling antidote to what can often be a facile stereotyping of fundamentalism, both its origins and its adherents.
Pamuk insinuates himself into the novel as the narrator named Orhan. He tells of the events of a three day visit to the town of Kars by his friend Ka, who has recently returned from a twelve year political exile in Germany, though his friend recalls him as more of a poet than someone deeply engaged in politics. Life in Germany weighed heavily on Ka, leaving him dispirited and unable to write poetry. Ostensibly travelling to Kars as a journalist to report on a rash of young women who have committed suicide in Kars and on the upcoming municipal elections, his true motive lies more in the realm of self-interest than politics: he hopes to win the heart of a beautiful former classmate, İpek, and convince her to go back to Germany with him to help fill the emptiness he feels living in a foreign land.
Ka arrives in Kars amid a winter blizzard, which continues for the first two days of his visit. The snow provides a beautiful white blanket that softens the poor and decaying state of the town, and, to Ka’s delight, helps him recover his muse; poems come to him so suddenly he seems to be taking dictation rather than consciously writing them. The heavy snowfall has, however, also shut off access to Kars, enabling an uncontrollable escalation in violence between political factions in the town. This violence occurs even as Ka’s public reasons for being in the city gradually entangle him into the dangerous political machinations of the various sides.
Generally wary of Ka, the people of Kars see him as an outsider and intellectual, with a hazy leftist political past that drove him into exile. In particular, neither the Turkish nationalists nor the Islamists treat him with much respect or trust, though this very status recommends him as an intermediary in the negotiations between the groups. For Ka, this access, like the snow that covers the city, has both good and bad implications: on the one hand it helps him at key points to make progress in his pursuit of the beautiful İpek; on the other, it puts him at grave risk at nearly every turn, as he becomes an expendable pawn between groups in a violent struggle for control not only of the local community, but of political and cultural developments nationally.
Complicating matters, Ka has returned from the long and dreary exile in Germany with a melancholy in his heart that leaves him flirting with a belief in God that he had lost during his youth in Istanbul. That he wears his religious confusion on his sleeve, however, only leaves his loyalties more suspect in the townspeople’s eyes. This again increases the risk to him personally as he moves among the competing faction in Kars.
When the long-simmering tensions in the town erupt into revolutionary violence, with the larger state security forces temporarily unable to reach the town through the snow-clogged roads, Ka’s search for meaning and an end to the deep melancholy that afflicts him turns into a tenuous, high-stakes struggle for love and survival.
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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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