Review: Orhan Pamuk's "Snow"
I am trying to do more reviews here of a literary nature, but for the time being, many of these will based on memory and a cursory glance at the text, so do have patience with me. I simply want to give you some information on works that I think are worth your time. Cheers. -Darrick
I don’t know a great deal about the Republic of Turkey. In World History courses, I have had occasion to cover the Ottoman Empire, but not so much the modern state of Turkey, which I don’t know a great deal about. I know vaguely about the Young Turks, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the establishment of the Republic under Attaturk, its alliance with the West during the Cold War, and its slow metamorphosis into an Islamic power under Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the past twenty years or so. But my knowledge is cursory and superficial.
Novels are not the works you should go to if you want to learn about a country; that’s what history books are for. That is also why people know so little about history. My father used to regale me with what he had learned from this or that movie about its historical content, and I never had the courage to tell him he now knew less about it than before he watched those films. However, I do think you can learn something about a country from works of fiction, if it is a great work of fiction.
This leads me to the subject of this post: Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow, which in at least in part earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. That should clue you in to what kind of writer Orhan Pamuk is. The Nobel committee does not give prizes to Islamists. Pamuk is a denizen of Istanbul, whose influences are all clearly Western literature—there are four quotations in the opening pages of my copy of the novel by Western European authors, three if you don’t think Dostoevsky is Western enough. Pamuk is famous partly for several historical novels set in the Ottoman Era, which is how I discovered his work. Having done no research, I take him to be a secular Turk who grew up in his country during the twentieth century, when Turkey positioned itself as a “modern” nation. Pamuk has penned a memoir titled Istanbul: Memories and the City, which seems to fit this idea. I cannot imagine he is a supporter of the current regime.
(Warning: there are spoilers from here on out)
One of the blurbs on the back of my copy says Snow is a political novel, and that is true in terms of the plot. Snow tells the story of a Turkish poet named Ka, who has been living in exile in Germany, but who returns to the provincial town where he is from to report on a series of suicides by young Muslim girls in the region, who are taking their own lives because the government has forbidden them to wear the headscarf, a symbol of Islamic identity. As he enters the town, snow is already falling and the roads into the city become blocked. There, Ka witnesses a political murder and is questioned by the police. He comes into contact with a local Muslim party leader as well as a charismatic terrorist. In the course of the novel, the government in the town (called Kars) declares a state of emergency, and there is an attempted coup by the Islamists which is quickly shutdown by the government once the roads open up. The revolution which comes to nothing, while the charismatic terrorist is assassinated and his followers go into exile in Berlin.
This sounds pretty political, but the novel did not feel that way when I read it, and indeed, I don’t think of it as a political novel. The story is told in a second person voice by a friend of Ka’s, who turns out to be Pamuk himself! He reconstructs his movements and even enters the story by the end of novel. Ka is a poet but he has not written anything for years till he comes back to Kars and begins writing poetry in bursts of inspiration (which Pamuk does not reproduce for the reader). Furthermore, at the heart of the book, underneath the political plot, is a love triangle: Ka winds up staying at a hotel owned by the family of a former lover named Ipek. He rekindles his passion for Ipek, even while engaging with her ex-husband, who is the local Islamic party boss. More dangerously, Ipek is also the former lover of Blue, the charismatic terrorist. In fact, it is intimated that it is Ka who is responsible for his assassination, because he led the police to Blue’s hideout. Though Ipek agrees to go to Frankfurt with Ka, when she finds out Blue is dead, she decides to stay, and he returns to Germany. Ka himself is assassinated, presumably by the terrorist group in revenge for Blue’s death. The novel ends with his Pamuk going back to Kars to see the places where he went and meet Ipek and her family.
The story is framed by the image of snow, which falls in Kars. I am not sure what Pamuk had in mind, but it is clear it suggests memory and forgetting: Ka’s loss of his gift and its recapture, his passion for Ipek and its loss. But also perhaps something more. Not just a political forgetting, but perhaps a civilizational one as well. Though the governments puts down the revolution and Blue is killed, it seems clear that Kars is being turned into an Islamic outpost, the provincial town that Ka knew was dying even as he died himself. One wonders is there isn’t a parallel with the author here; if Pamuk is someone who believes in Western ideals, the coming of an Islamic Turkey must have felt—must feel—like a lush green landscape being covered in snow, the world he knew being covered over by something he cannot believe in.
And that world, at least as it came across to me in reading Snow was a sad one. Ka appears like something of a lost soul, without a binding purpose in his life. Ipek, the woman he loves, appears like someone who could not find what she wanted in life either. Toward the end, when Ka’s friend visits Kars and awkwardly professes his love for her, her reply is poignant:
“Orhan Bey,” said Ipek, “I tried hard to love Muhtar but it didn’t work out. I loved Blue with all my heart but it didn’t work out. I believed I would learn to love Ka but that didn't work out either. I longed for a child but a child never came. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone again; I don’t have the heart for it. All I want to do now is look after my nephew, Ömercan. But I’d like to thank you anyway, even though I can’t take you seriously.”
It is a pretty wounding but excruciatingly honest remark—her last in the novel. One of the great strengths of Snow is that it shows much the personal bleeds into the political. In all my study of history, I often have been struck by how historical figures who become great supporters of this or that cause, this or that intellectual school, came to it as a matter of personal rivalry, and only later came to identify themselves wholly with it. Snow puts these together in a novel of incredible sadness, of loss. Not hopeless, not despairing, but very, very sad. I don’t go looking for Nobel Prize winning authors to be pretentious, and you can see why the Nobel committee would have liked it. It must have seemed like a cautionary tale about the dangers of mixing religion and politics to them. But besides being a fine writer, Pamuk is a good storyteller. Even if you are not a religious person, as I am, it is well worth your time.
It certainly has stayed on mind all these years. I can’t help thinking that the world that Ka and Ipek grew up in could not continue, that it lacked the cohesion necessary to sustain it. And by that, I mean the secular world Pamuk grew up in, and I assume still believes in, as I do not. He, like myself, grew up in a twentieth century world that was stable, international, secular, where all the things that seem to bedevil the world had been put behind it—religious, purpose, meaning in life. But Pamuk seemed to see with his novelist’s eye these things coming back into the world, for good and ill, long before others. He has left us a magnificent story of how such a personal world can come to be covered over, forgotten in the silence of time, buried like green earth beneath the midwinter snow.