More than a winter's tale

Orhan Pamuk illuminates Turkey's many voices in a complex story of a poet returning from exile, Snow

Sarah Emily Miano
Sunday May 30, 2004
The Observer

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Faber £16.99, pp436

'Every life is like a snowflake,' whose forms appear identical from afar, but are determined by any number of mysterious forces, making each one singular. This metaphor lies at the centre of Orhan Pamuk's profound new novel, Snow, a Dostoyevskian political thriller: 'How much can we ever know about 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?'

These questions haunt the poet Ka, who has returned to Istanbul in 1992 for his mother's funeral, after living as an exile in Frankfurt for more than a decade. But the story begins as he travels to a Turkish border town called Kars on a journalistic assignment from the secularist newspaper the Republican, to cover the municipal elections and an apparent suicide epidemic among the Muslim women there. Ka is disheartened by the changes he has seen in Istanbul, and hopes to recapture his childhood farther afield, but with an ulterior motive: he has heard that a former classmate, the beautiful Ipek, has separated from her husband, and he wants to win her heart. This novel is as much about love as it is about politics.

In Kars, a blizzard shuts down the roads; the city can only hint of the old days in 'sad postcard memories'- empty squares, decrepit Russian and Armenian buildings; it seems like 'the end of the world'. He stays at the Snow Palace Hotel where Ipek lives with her father and sister, and manages to weave his way into their lives with its compulsive TV-viewing, religious disagreements and political entanglements. As he investigates the suicides of the 'headscarf girls' he has fascinating encounters with the women's families, the editor of the newspaper, the police and various politicos. The people are divided by loyalties to the Turkish state and the rising Islamist parties, by religion and atheism. Ka, like Pamuk himself, is from a middle-class family in Istanbul; and as an educated, westernised Turk, everyone considers him a non-believer; yet he sees God in both the snow and his own poems, which come to him on a cloud of divine inspiration.

During a performance in the National Theatre, when Ka recites his first new poem in years, there is a military coup in which many pupils from the Islamic religious high school are killed. Some believe it is a stand against Kurdish nationalism and an attempt to keep the 'religious fanatics' from winning the elections. But two actors have a hand in the coup, and what begins as a staged event kicks off a terrible chain of events: the arrest and persecution of religious leaders and Islamist candidates, the murder of Kurds, the torture and intimidation of schoolboys. The citizens watch the action on their television screens, while Ka looks for happiness with Ipek, though it is always just beyond them.

Pamuk's protagonist is a man of melancholy and secrets in a sea of other characters who are tossed about by uncertainties. An Islamist student warns Ka: 'I'd like you 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.' So the players in the story, including Ka, are cast in a shadow of indeterminacy - which makes the novel even more compelling. Still, Pamuk manages to give voice to everyone involved: reactionaries, terrorists, liberals, fundamentalists.

A militant Islamist tells Ka that their people have been entranced by the West because 'we've forgotten our own stories'. Pamuk suggests that his country can only rediscover itself through storytelling. So he makes the call even as he answers it, with a political allegory that provides an historical vision of his society. The account takes the form of a meticulously constructed snowflake in which nothing is out of place, and where revelation and concealment occur in impeccable order.