Orhan Pamuk is a beautiful writer. The well-known Turkish writer may be more popular in the West due to his 2005 request that the Turkish Government admit to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17. Standing up to the authorities got him temporarily exiled. But Pamuk is more than a dissident. He is a man who knows his literature and who uses plots, twists and wry humor to tell a small tale with big importance.
Now, you must know that this book was a book group choice and when we met to DISCUSS the book – I was the only one to have finished. We are not stupid nor completely ignorant readers, neither are we particularly verbose in our discussions. “ He was a loser” is often used to describe the protagonist and if one of us uses “protagonist” the rest all flinch a bit. (Sure, comment on how uninformed we are and make fun – but I’m being honest).
Snow is the story of Ka, a middle-aged poet who returns to Turkey after years of exile in Frankfurt. He has returned to Turkey for his mother’s funeral and continues on to Kars to write an article about the head scarf girls. The head scarf girls are being denied a secular education unless they remove their head scarves, and some of the girls have hence committed suicide. However, Ka is really returning to Kars, a run-down, depressed little village to see and (dare he think it!) have the love of his life, Ipek, return to Germany with him.
If he can pull it off Ka thinks he will be happy. Ka has never been happy – isn’t this a Western idea anyway? What follows is a complex mix of humor (the town paper that prints tomorrow’s news in advance – complete with theatre reviews of productions yet seen and secret police agents who make no attempt to hide themselves from those they watch) and political upheaval as Kurdish nationalists, Islamic fundamentalists, old communists and the fight for Muslim women’s right all converge as the snow falls, and falls and falls. They all get trapped in Kars, as indeed some readers felt strongly, they too got trapped in the reading, and a small revolution occurs and innocent people are killed.
Obviously, Pamuk is covering a lot of ground here. Women’s rights, Turkey’s fight to maintain it’s own national identity while accommodating secular government and fundamentalist Islam. A central discussion when Ka somehow manages to get all the factions together in one room to write a proclaimation to The West, is a discussion of how Turkey is viewed in The West (and much discussion as to whether complaints should be lodged against The West, The Europeans or indeed The World). As one Kurd says, “…when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the rest of the world assumes that they must be brainless, lazy, dirty…It’s all a joke: their culture, their costumes.” As this book makes very clear, this is no joke – it is of national importance and lives are lost in defining what they believe Turkey to be.
At one point, I thought, I’m just not smart enough to follow all this, but then it was pointed out that perhaps this novel is merely a love story. A love story of one man’s desire to be loved, to be happy and his love of his country no matter how it is defined.