What Book to Read?

Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s best-selling novelist. His work has also been highly praised by Western critics and in 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is not however without critics in Turkey; in 2005 conservatives tried unsuccessfully to have him prosecuted for ‘insulting Turkishness’ after he publicly raised the issue of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey.

Pamuk is well aware of the divisive pressures in Turkey: Western secularism, modernity, Kemalism (as in Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), nationalism and religious fundamentalism all coexist uneasily, to say nothing of wealth and poverty and urbanism and provincialism. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize, he said: ‘What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears’. For him, telling stories offers a way of making sense of people’s varied experience and aspirations.

Snow was published in 2002, (English translation Maureen Freely 2004) and is the first of his novels to deal with modern Turkey, being set in the early 1990s. Kerim Alakusoglu, know as Ka, is a poet who has not written anything for years. He has returned from self imposed exile in Germany where he fled after the 1980 military coup. After attending his mother’s funeral in Istanbul, he decides to visit Kars. This is a town in the far north east of Anatolia, once of strategic importance to the Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans, then an Armenian and a Russian garrison; now it is a decaying backwater. His ostensible reason for the visit is to report as a journalist on the municipal elections, which look like returning an Islamist candidate as mayor, and on a spate of suicides among young women in the town. Is it because they have been forced by the local education authorities to remove their headscarves? But equally important is his desire to see a recently divorced friend from his student days now living there. Kar is the Turkish word for snow; a snow storm cuts Kars off from the outside world. So we have Ka in Kars in kar.

This sort of post modern playfulness is clearly intentional; Pamuk after all teaches comparative literature at Columbia University. The point of view of the novel is also handled in a post modern way. Ka appears to be the protagonist, and much of the action is presented from his perspective. But early on we learn that someone else is telling the story; his name just happens to be Orhan. ‘I’m an old friend of Ka’s,’ he says, ‘and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.’ Despite the realism of the descriptions of Kars and the snow that blankets it, and the quickly sketched but brilliant portraits of many of the characters, much of the story seems to be mischievously satirical, though a dangerously thin line separates it from tragedy.

Because he wishes to include rather than make judgements which exclude, everyone gets to make their case: the Islamists, the secularists, the Kemalists and the ordinary people who just want a bit of excitement in their lives. Many times in the story a view that some would find unpalatable is put forward by a character who is otherwise appealing – and vice versa; this is part of the ‘hidden symmetry’ of life. It is also a story about love and poetry; both come to Ka like flashes of inspiration. And then there is the snow as both symbol and reality – the singularity of the individual snow flake and the anonymity of the blanketing drifts that cover ugliness but also isolate and confine. Pamuk has so many balls in the air that I was almost giddy trying to keep up with him. And I was never sure whether head scarves really were the issue for the suicide girls of Kars, because they are one group who can’t speak for themselves.

There are so many things going on in this book that I haven’t done justice to that I suggest you read some of the reviews listed here. I found Margaret Atwood’s comments in The New York Times particularly interesting. You can find out more about Orhan Pamuk here, or through his web site here. Some recent comments by him on the relationship between Turkey and Europe can be found here.