Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
First Vintage International Edition, 2005
Orhan Pamuk’s homeland of Turkey suffers the abrasions of existing as the rift between the tectonic plates of the Eastern and Western worlds. Snow principally succeeds in analyzing this tension; the local politics and the love story are coincidental. A grouping of epigraphs pinpoint the novel’s main sentiment: “The Westerner in me was discomposed,” from Joseph Conrad, and “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people,” from Dostoevsky.
The conflict of the novel is embodied in the poet Ka’s return to his Turkish home city from Germany. Central to Ka’s struggle lies religion: “As Ka knew from the beginning, in this part of the world faith in God was not something achieved by thinking sublime thoughts and stretching one’s creative powers to their outer limits; nor was it something one could do alone; above all it meant joining a mosque, becoming part of a community. Nevertheless, Ka was still disappointed that Muhtar could talk so much about his group without once mentioning God or his own private faith. He despised Muhtar for it.” Pamuk’s characters refresh the tired battle between atheists and fervent believers.
Ka’s visit is incited by a report of suicides committed by Muslim girls who take drastic action after being prohibited from attending school covered in head scarves. His ostensible purpose is to investigate and write a report for a German newspaper, but his real motive is to reacquaint himself with the beautiful and recently divorced Ipek and marry her. His desire for her is entirely shallow, based on her tremendous beauty, and nothing more substantial than lust composes their relationship. The presence of a second author, the translator, may be the source of the inanity. It is possible that idiosyncrasies of the Turkish language are lost in the English language. Nevertheless, when their relationship tragically falls apart in the throes of miscommunication, the reader is neither surprised nor significantly affected. As our narrator informs us that “we are now approaching the heart of the matter: for until that moment I could have said I had seen nothing for which I had the story I have related in this book: Ipek was more beautiful than anyone could have imagined,” we are frustrated by a lack of imagination in describing her beauty.
Ka’s visit to the economically and spiritually depressed Kars is strangely enchanted. The city is blanketed in snow (a reiterated image) and awash in blinding whiteness. “It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. They fell silent for a while.” Rather than simply a sign of renewal or redemption for the town, the oppressive weather signifies a “carnivalesque” period. In a brilliant ironic twist, the roads are all closed and the town falls to a takeover by a “coup-de-theatre.” Nationalistic actors and a few soldiers stage a play in which an actress removes her head scarf – not to cleanse it as the audience expects – but to burn it in an act of defiance. Religious youths in the crowd become boisterous and protest this blatant offense against Islam, only to witness some soldiers/actors fire rounds into the crowd. Based on the premise of the theater and a play being performed, the audience is slow to comprehend that the guns have shot actual rounds, killing nearly a dozen people. This section is a striking depiction of political upstarts, using the theatricality of the event to point to the absurd events. During the last performance by the troupe, the leader Sunay is shot, lamenting, “How stupid all this is! They know nothing about modern art, they’ll never be modern!”
As a reader biased with the privileges and prejudices of being a member of the Western world, I experienced moments of uncertainty. I stood guilty in the face of characters who provided such indictments as: “When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.” I appreciated the irony, but was unsure if I was missing out on other aspects of the story. Westerners are helped by the encouraged empathy with the narrator and his protagonist, who is just as much of a stranger in Kars as the reader. Narrated by a phantom for most of the novel, we only learn more about the author’s identity and relation to Ka late in the novel. “Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?” If this is truly the heart of the story, it is frail; the relationship between the two is unwisely presupposed and referenced to as an entity outside the novel. With the elision of all but six lines of Ka’s poetry, where we would hope to glimpse more of his life, the reader cannot see very much at all.
My expectations may have been inflated with the knowledge that Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk displays ingenious marks of the great Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Snow openly wrestles with ideas of freedom, religion, and humanity by employing similar techniques as Brothers Karamazov. Instead of the Grand Inquisition, we have Muhtar preaching on the tragic loss of identity in the East: ‘“But I didn’t tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it’s forgotten. This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi’s Shehname. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart—from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon—and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to the people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories…How do you explain this?”
Ka’s poetry is incredibly intriguing but problematic. Nowhere do we receive more than several lines of his highly esteemed work. Instead, the reader is provided with notes from his journal and an interesting geometric figure – a six-pointed snowflake representative of his newest collection of poetry. Upon visiting Kars, his writing drought ends and a bevy of new poems results from the landscape, his conversations with others about God, religion, and love. The axes of this diagram are labeled “Memory, Imagination and Reason.” It is at these termini that he organizes his poems into different groups and establishes the relationships between them. At the center is the seminal poem, “I, Ka,” which is his European manifesto of individualism. Ka’s solipsistic wandering across town and poetical musing, his attempt to possess a beautiful woman rather than love her, and the narrator’s devotion to having his story told leave the reader wondering what else would Ka expect other than misery and lack of fulfillment?
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