Snow by Orhan Pamuk

ContentsThe Guardian.........................................................................................................................................1

Frozen assets: James Buchan enjoys Orhan Pamuk's evocation of Anatolia, Snow, but finds there's something missing.............................................................................................................................1

The Atlantic...........................................................................................................................................2

Mind the Gap, A review by Christopher Hitchens..............................................................................2

The Complete Review............................................................................................................................6

The New York Times..............................................................................................................................8

Washington Post.................................................................................................................................10

Winter's Tale....................................................................................................................................10

Discussion Questions...........................................................................................................................11

The Guardian, Saturday 29 May 2004

Frozen assets: James Buchan enjoys Orhan Pamuk's evocation of Anatolia, Snow, but finds there's something missingJames Buchan, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, 436pp

Orhan Pamuk's new novel is set in the early 1990s in Kars, a remote and dilapidated city in eastern Anatolia famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation and Russian imperial rule than for its spectacularly awful weather. Snow, "kar" in Turkish, falls incessantly on the treeless plains and the castle, river and boulevards of Kars, which the local scholars say takes its name from "karsu" (snow-water).

In this novel, the city is cut off from the world and also, to an extent, from normal literary reality by three days of unremitting snow. Written, the reader is told, between 1999 and 2001, Snow deals with some of the large themes of Turkey and the Middle East: the conflict between a secular state and Islamic government, poverty, unemployment, the veil, the role of a modernising army, suicide and yet more suicide. Pamuk's master here is Dostoevsky, but amid the desperate students, cafés, small shopkeepers, gunshots and inky comedy are the trickeries familiar from modern continental fiction. The result is large and expansive, but, even at 436 pages, neither grand nor heavy.

Pamuk's hero is a dried-up poet named Kerim Alakusoglu, conveniently abbreviated to Ka: Ka in kar in Kars. After many years in political exile in Frankfurt, Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. He is then commissioned by an Istanbul newspaper to write an article about the municipal elections in Kars and investigate a succession of suicides by women and girls in the city. In his role as journalist, Ka trudges through the snow interviewing the families of the girls. He learns that they are committing suicide because of pressure by the college authorities to take off their headscarves in class. (Compulsory unveiling succeeds just as well as compulsory veiling, which is not very well.)

It soon emerges that Ka is not greatly interested in headscarves but has come to fall in love with his old Istanbul schoolmate, Ipek, who has ended up in Kars and is separated from her husband. Meanwhile, his lyric gift returns to him with a force bordering on incontinence, and he is forever plunging into tea houses to get his latest poem down in a green notebook. Another narrator, called

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Orhan Pamuk, tells the story not from the notebook, which is lost or stolen, but from notes in Ka's handwriting that he finds four years later in the poet's flat in Frankfurt.

The book is full of winning characters, from Ka himself to Blue, a handsome Islamist terrorist with the gift of the gab, an actor-manager and his wife who tour small Anatolian towns staging revolutionary plays and coups de main, and Serdar Bey, the local newspaper editor, who has a habit of writing up events and running them off his ancient presses before they occur. There are many fine scenes, including one where a hidden tape records the last conversation between a college professor in a bakery and his Islamist assassin.

Yet there are literary judgments that some readers will question. The first is to omit Ka's poems. The green book has been lost or stolen and what remain are Ka's notes on how he came to write his 19 poems in Kars and how they might be arranged on the crystalline model of a snowflake. That is quite as dull as it sounds: really, in a book so expansive and light, the only dull passages. Incidentally, what verse there is in the book, copied from the wall of the tea-shop, is worth reading. One senses that Ka is a poet visiting Kars because the poet Pushkin visited Kars (on June 12 and 13 1829).

Pamuk also decides to stage his two narrative climaxes as theatre. The first of these, in which soldiers fire live rounds into the audience from the stage of the National Theatre in Kars during a live television broadcast, is a fine job of writing and translating, but the effect is the same as with the descriptions of Ka's poems. The second literary layer makes the matters at issue both fainter and less persuasive. Pamuk likes to undermine and destabilise each character by introducing a degenerate counterpart: not merely Ka/Pamuk, but Ipek and her almost-as-beautiful sister Kadife, the two Islamist students Necib and Fazil, and so on.

This playfulness or irony may be a response to a literary dilemma. To use a European literary form such as the novel in Turkey is, in an important sense, to ally oneself with European notions of individualism, liberty and democracy that even when they are upheld (rather than breached) are meaningless to traditional Muslims. Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.

Pamuk knows that as well as anybody and dramatises it in a raucous scene in which a group of leftists, Kurds and Islamists gather in a hotel room to write a letter to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He also anticipates his critics by having Serdar Bey accuse Ka in the Border Gazette of being so "ashamed of being a Turk that you hide your true name behind the fake, foreign, counterfeit name of Ka". In fact, the best sentences in the book are those entirely without any playfulness, or indeed any artistry, such as this one, where Ka remembers the almost permanent state of military coup d'état of his Istanbul childhood: "As a child he'd loved those martial days like holidays."

A more serious challenge to novelists in Turkey, Iran and the Arab world is that the events of September 11, the Moscow theatre attack and Abu Ghraib are both more romantic and more desperate than even Dostoevsky could have dreamed up and written down.

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The Atlantic, Review-a-Day; Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

Mind the Gap, A review by Christopher Hitchens

Well before the fall of 2001 a search was in progress, on the part of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope was (and is) that an apparently "answering" voice, attuned to irony and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural, would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans and remit

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them in an intelligible form. Hence the popularity of the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who seemed in his Cairo café-society mode to be potentially "one of us" -- even more so when he had the misfortune to be stabbed in the neck by a demented fundamentalist. There was a much lesser vogue for spikier secular writers, such as the late Abdelrahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet, and the late Israeli Arab Emil Habibi, whose novel Saeed the Pessoptimist is the favorite narrative of many Palestinians (and who also had the grace to win Israel's national prize for the best writing in Hebrew). In some ways those two were not quite "Muslim" enough for the purposes of authenticity.

Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. Turkey is, physically and historically, the "bridge" between East and West, and I have yet to read a Western newspaper report from the country that fails to employ that cheering metaphor. (I cannot be certain how many "Eastern" articles and broadcasts are similarly affirmative.) With his previous novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk himself became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles and doing so in a "postmodern" fashion that laid due emphasis on texts, figures, and representations. After 9/11 he was the natural choice for The New York Review of Books, to which he contributed a decent if unoriginal essay that expressed horror at the atrocities while admonishing Westerners not to overlook the wretched of the earth. In Turkey he spoke up for Kurdish rights and once refused a state literary award. Some of his fellow secularists, however, felt that he was too ready to "balance" his views with criticism of the Kemalist and military forces that act as guarantors of Turkey's secularism.

In a Bush speech to the new membership of NATO, delivered in Istanbul last June, one of the President's handlers was astute enough to insert a quotation from Pamuk, to the effect that the finest view of the city was not from its European or its Asian shores but from -- yes -- the "bridge that unites them." The important thing, as the President went on to intone from Pamuk, "is not the clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West." No; what is important is to recognize "that other peoples in other continents and civilizations" are "exactly like you." De te fabula narratur.

Human beings are of course essentially the same, if not exactly identical. But somehow this evolutionary fact does not prevent clashes of varying intensity from being the norm rather than the exception. "Remember your humanity, and forget the rest," Albert Einstein is supposed to have said. This already questionable call to amnesia translates badly in cultures that regard Einstein himself as a Satanic imp spawned from the hideous loins of Jewish degeneration.

In his new novel Pamuk gives us every reason to suppose that he is far more ambivalent about this facile "bridge-building" stuff than he has so far let on. The plot is complex yet susceptible of summary. Narrated by Pamuk, with the advantages of both foresight and hindsight, it shows an anomic young Turk named Kerim Alakusoglu, a poet with a bad case of literary sterility and sexual drought, as he negotiates a moment of personal and political crisis in the city of Kars, on the Turkish-Armenian frontier. Disliking his given name, the man prefers to go under the acronym formed by his initials: "Ka." Having taken part in the violent and futile Marxist-Leninist student movement that was eventually obliterated by the military coup of 1980, and having followed so many of his ex-comrades into exile in Germany, Ka is a burned-out case. Pretending to seek a journalistic assignment in this remote town, which has recently witnessed an epidemic of suicide by young girls thwarted in their desire to take the Muslim veil, he is in fact magnetized by the possibility of seeing Ipek, the lost flame of his youth. As he arrives, a blizzard isolates the city and almost buries it in snow -- for which the Turkish word is kar. One might therefore deploy a cliché and say that the action is frozen in time.

When frozen in the present, the mise-en-scene discloses a community of miserably underemployed people, caught among a ramshackle state machine, a nascent Islamism, and the claims of competing nationalist minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town, and it enacts a "play within a play," in which the bitter violence of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to alternate between visions of

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"snow" in its macrocosmic form -- the chilly and hostile masses -- and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.

In terms of characterization the novel is disappointing, precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of individuals. Ipek, for example, appears on almost every page yet is barely allowed any quality other than her allegedly wondrous beauty. The protagonists speak their lines as Islamists, secularists, conformists, and opportunists. And the author leaves no room for doubt that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous. This is true in spite of the utter nonsense that he makes them spout. A couple of Muslim boys corner Ka and demand that he answer this question, about a dead girl he never met:

Now we'd like to know if you could do us both a favor. The thing is, we can both accept that Teslime might have been driven to the sin of suicide by the pressures from her parents and the state. It's very painful; Fazil can't stop thinking that the girl he loved committed the sin of suicide. But if Teslime was a secret atheist like the one in the story, if she was one of those unlucky souls who don't even know that they are atheists, or if she committed suicide because she was an atheist, for Fazil this is a catastrophe: It means he was in love with an atheist.

I should caution the potential reader that a great deal of the dialogue is as lengthy and stilted as that, even if in this instance the self-imposed predicaments of the pious, along with their awful self-pitying solipsism, are captured fairly well. So is the superiority/inferiority complex of many provincial Turks -- almost masochistic when it comes to detailing their own woes, yet intensely resentful of any "outside" sympathy. Most faithfully rendered, however, is the pervading sense that secularism has been, or is being, rapidly nullified by diminishing returns. The acting troupe is run by a vain old Kemalist mountebank named Sunay Zaim, who once fancied himself an Atatürk look-alike, and his equally decrepit and posturing lady friend. The army and the police use torture as a matter of course to hang on to power. Their few civilian supporters are represented as diseased old ex-Stalinists whose leader -- one Z. Demirkol, not further named -- could have leapt from the pages of Soviet agitprop. These forces take advantage of the snowstorm to mount a coup in Kars and impose their own arbitrary will, though it is never explained why they do this or how they can hope to get away with it.

In contrast, the Muslim fanatics are generally presented in a favorable or lenient light. A shadowy "insurgent" leader, incongruously named "Blue," is a man of bravery and charm, who may or may not have played a heroic role in the fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. (Among these and many other contemporary references, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are never mentioned.) The girls who immolate themselves for the right to wear head-covering are shown as if they had been pushed by the pitiless state, or by their gruesome menfolk, to the limits of endurance. They are, in other words, veiled quasi-feminists. The militant boys of their age are tormented souls seeking the good life in the spiritual sense. The Islamist ranks have their share of fools and knaves, but these tend to be ex-leftists who have switched sides in an ingratiating manner. Ka himself is boiling with guilt, about the "European" character that he has acquired in exile in Frankfurt, and about the realization that the Istanbul bourgeoisie, from which he originates, generally welcomes military coups without asking too many questions. The posturing Sunay at least phrases this well.

No one who's even slightly westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they're better than everyone else and look down on other people. If it weren't for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women and chopping them all into little pieces. But what do these upstarts do in return? They cling to their little European ways and turn up their affected little noses at the very soldiers who guarantee their freedom.

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A continuous theme of the novel, indeed, is the rancor felt by the local inhabitants against anyone who has bettered himself -- let alone herself -- by emigrating to an undifferentiated "Europe" or by aping European manners and attitudes. A secondary version of this bitterness, familiar to those who study small-town versus big-city attitudes the world over, is the suspicion of those left behind that they are somehow not good enough. But this mutates into the more consoling belief that they are despised by the urbane. Only one character -- unnamed -- has the nerve to point out that if free visas were distributed, every hypocrite in town would leave right away and Kars would be deserted.

As for the past tense in which Kars is also frozen, I have to rely on a certain amount of guesswork. Although Ka's acronym could ostensibly have been drawn from any pair of consonant/vowel first and last names, I presume from Pamuk's demonstrated interest in codes and texts that K and A were chosen deliberately. There seem to be two possibilities here: one is "Kemal Atatürk," the military founder of modern secular Turkey; the other is "Kurdistan and Armenia," standing in for the national subtexts of the tale.

Pamuk supplies no reason for his selection, but the setting of Kars means that he might intend elements of both of the above. The city was lost by Ottoman Turkey to Russia in 1878, regained in 1918, and then briefly lost again to an alliance of Bolsheviks and Armenians until, in late 1920, it became the scene of a Turkish nationalist victory that fixed the boundary between Turkey and then-Soviet Armenia that endures to the present day. (This event was among the many negations of Woodrow Wilson's postwar diplomacy, which had "awarded" the region to the Armenians.) From Kars, also in 1920, the legendary Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi set out along the frontier region, dotted with magically evocative place-names like Erzurum and Trebizond, and was murdered with twelve of his comrades by right-wing "Young Turks." This killing was immortalized by Nazim Hikmet in a poem that is still canonical in Turkey. (Hikmet himself, the nation's unofficial laureate, was to spend decades in jail and in exile because of his Communist loyalties.) The outright victor in all those discrepant struggles was Mustafa Kemal, who had helped defeat two "Christian" invasions of Turkish soil in his capacity as a soldier, and who went on to assume absolute political power and to supervise and direct the only lasting secular revolution that a Muslim society has ever undergone. His later change of name to Kemal Atatürk was only part of his driving will to "Westernize" Turkey, Latinize its script, abolish male and female religious headgear, adopt surnames, and in general erase the Islamic caliphate that today's fundamentalists hope to restore.

Pamuk is at his best in depicting the layers of the past that are still on view in Kars -- in particular the Armenian houses and churches and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population. The price of Kemalism was the imposition of a uniform national identity on Turkey, where ethnic and religious variety was heavily repressed, and where the standard-issue unsmiling bust of Atatürk -- pervasive in Pamuk's account of the scenery and most often described as the target of terrorism or vandalism -- became the symbol of military rule. (Atatürk was a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution, but Turkey, as was once said of Prussia, is not so much a country that has an army as an army that has a country.) In these circumstances it takes a certain amount of courage for any Turkish citizen to challenge the authorized version of modern statehood.

However, courage is an element that this novel lacks. Some important Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the Armenian genocide and a critique of the official rationalizations for it. The principal author in this respect is Taner Akcam, who, as Pamuk is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany -- whereas from reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at. As for the Kurds, Pamuk tends to represent them as rather primitive objects of sympathy.

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Ka's poetic rebirth involves him, and us, in a comparable fatalism and passivity. Early in the story he is quite baldly described as feeling a predetermined poem coming on, and is prevented from completion of the closing lines only by a sudden knock at the door. I managed to assimilate the implied allusion to Coleridge's Kubla Khan. But about fifty pages later, when another poem was successfully delivered from Ka's subconscious, I was confronted with a full-out deadpan account of the person from Porlock who had interrupted Coleridge at the critical moment. Pamuk's literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn't trust the reader until he has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most didactic kind. Throughout the remainder of the novel, though, we are invited to believe in the miraculous rather than the mundane: Ka quite simply sits himself down at odd moments and sets out near faultless poems (never quoted) on whatever paper is handy. The necessary cliché about "automatic writing" is eventually employed, somewhat heavily, to account for this. But I was inevitably put in mind of the Koran, or "recitation," by which the Prophet Muhammad came to be the supposed medium of the divine.

Ka is presented to us as a man who has assumed or affected his atheism as a kind of protective epidermis. His unbelief is of a piece with his attempt to deaden his emotions and decrease his vulnerability. His psyche is on a knife edge, and he is always ready to be overwhelmed by the last person he has spoken to. Yet he can watch an educator being shot in cold blood by a Muslim zealot and feel nothing. Only when in the company of beaming Dervishes and Sufis -- those Islamic sects that survived Atatürk's dissolution of clerical power -- does he become moist and trusting and openhearted. Yet "rising up inside him was that feeling he had always known as a child and as a young man at moments of extraordinary happiness: a prospect of future misery and hopelessness." Like the Danish prince who had a version of the same difficulty, Ka finds a form of cathartic relief in helping to produce the violent stage play that expresses his own fears and dreads. Pamuk drops in many loud references to Chekhov, and the gun that is on the mantelpiece from the beginning of the action is at last duly and lethally discharged. (It is described as a "Canakkale" rifle, Canakkale being the Turkish name for the Dardanelle Straits and the site of Gallipoli -- the battle that was Atatürk's baptism as a leader.) The handgun that goes off later, and extinguishes Ka's life, is heard only offstage. But it is clear that Islamist revenge has followed him to the heart of Europe and punished him for his ambivalence.

Prolix and often clumsy as it is, Pamuk's new novel should be taken as a cultural warning. So weighty was the impression of Atatürk that ever since his death, in 1938, Western statecraft has been searching for an emulator or successor. Nasser was thought for a while to be the needful charismatic, secularizing strongman. So was Sadat. So, for a while, was the Shah of Iran. And so was Saddam Hussein... Eager above all to have a modern yet "Muslim" state within the tent, the United States and the European Union have lately been taking Turkey's claims to modernity more and more at face value. The attentive reader of Snow will not be so swift to embrace this consoling conclusion.

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The Complete ReviewIn Snow the poet Ka returns to Turkey after more than a decade abroad, and journeys to Kars, far in the east. Among the things he hopes to find there is an old classmate and love, Ipek, now separated from her husband. He also plans to explore and report on a wave of suicides by girls there. It is snowing when Ka arrives, and the snow continues to fall, cutting off the town from the rest of the world. There is tension there: an upcoming mayoral election, the struggle between religion and secularism, a heavy-handed police presence. The conflict between Islam -- and, for example, the right of girls to go to school wearing head-scarves -- and the secular society the government has imposed causes the most problems; it is also an explanation for why the girls are killing themselves.

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Ka is an outsider. He begins as a dutiful journalist, talking to a variety of town figures, trying to learn more about the suicides, but finds himself drawn into this larger conflict. Throughout the country, and especially in this region, it is no longer the Kurds that are perceived by the authorities as being the greatest threat, but the increasingly influential Islamists. Ka, respected as a poet but tainted as one who has presumably been polluted by Western thought and ways, is viewed with both suspicion and interest by both sides. The police are reluctant to rough him up -- as they do the locals -- because of his Istanbul and German connexions, while the Islamists see him as the enemy (godless, westernised) but warily accept that he might be able to help convey their message. Eventually, he is also used as a go-between by both sides.

Ka is also racked by self-doubt -- and god-doubt, as the question of his atheism constantly arises. Resurgent Islam doesn't accept half measures, however: Ka is warned:

If you want to save your skin, I would advise you to increase your faith in God at the earliest opportunity. it won't be long, I fear, before a moderate belief in God will be insufficient to save the skin of an old atheist.

Even when he thinks he believes, the artist Ka clearly has a different conception of godliness, as he is reminded by one of the Islamic leaders when he describes it:

"Before I got here, I hadn't written a poem in years," he said. "But since coming to Kars, all the roads on which poetry travels here have reopened. I attribute this to the love of God I've felt here." "I don't want to destroy your illusions, but your love of God comes out of Western romantic novels," said Blue. "In a place like this, if you worship God as a European, you're bound to be a laughingstock. Then you cannot even believe you believe. You don't belong to this country; you're not even a Turk anymore. First try to be like everyone else. then try to believe in God."

The conflict is everywhere: even Ipek's family, which runs the hotel where Ka is staying, is half-torn, as Ipek's sister Kadife is active in the Islamist movement and a strong believer, while Ipek's marriage broke up over her husband's embrace of Islam and his unacceptable (to her) demand that she wear a head-scarf.

A locally televised performance, at which Ka also reads one of his poems, goes catastrophically (and surreally) wrong, leading to a mini-coup and curfew, and a further clamp-down on the Islamists -- who, however, have much local support. The city remains cut off -- for a few days a world unto itself -- and the conflict continues, its many players as active as ever. Ka, meanwhile, is pushed back and forth between them, unable to extricate himself -- while all the while pursuing Ipek.

There is much discussion of the proper course of action. Tolerance is shown by individuals, but seems almost impossible to put into practise, as each force seeks to impose its own absolutism (symbolized by the head scarf, but obviously going much further). Each side, too, is undermined from within: suicide is a grievous sin, while the arbitrary show of force by those in power have little to do with actual secular ideals (and show little respect for the rights of individuals).

Art is central to the novel, and two theatrical performance -- each involving at least one shooting -- are the centrepieces of the book. In truly dramatic fashion, revolution is practised on the stage (though the resonance -- as described -- isn't quite as strong as one might imagine). Then there is Ka, who is able to write poetry again: none of the poems are reproduced here, but the genesis of each is carefully noted and often described in some detail; there is even an index at the end of the book, of "The order in which Ka wrote his poems".

It is the desire to write a book about these poems that leads the narrator -- an alter-Orhan Pamuk, and longtime friend of Ka's -- to tell this story. The presentation is unusual, the narrator at the fore in certain chapters, acknowledging that he writes this years after the events and describing his research in Germany and Turkey on the trail of Ka, while elsewhere disappearing entirely and presenting the story as it happens, as if he had witnessed all the events. He reveals some of what

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happened before he describes it -- Ka's fate, for example --, an odd approach that takes some of the suspense away and yet also serves to focus attention more on the why, revealed only when the events are allowed to unfold.

Snow is a book about the difficulties faced by a nation torn between tradition, religion, and modernization. Set in the farthest east of Turkey, the locals are certain that in Western eyes they're all considered ignorant yokels. They suffer from a dreadful inferiority complex, and a need to prove themselves to counter that. Religion is the easiest crutch to rely on (and, in the case of this religion, one that conveniently scares the hell out of the infidels, of course). The struggle is not only with the West, however, but with the strong tradition of secularism in Turkey itself. As one character says:

To play the rebel heroine in Turkey you don't pull off your scarf, you put it on."

In Snow Pamuk effectively portrays these difficulties, and the many ambiguities in contemporary Turkish life -- there's little that's simply black and white here -- but the book loses steam about halfway through (or bogs down in the snow, which there's an awful lot of here). There's a great deal of dialogue; Ka's uncertain position -- he's not entirely sure where he stands -- makes him even more of an odd man out, and after a while one longs for more certainty, rather than -- as it seems to become -- less and less. There's also quite a bit of negotiation, as people are asked to do certain things in exchange for other things, but the uneven playing field generally does not lead to satisfying (or at least hoped for) results; that's perhaps realistic, yet not entirely satisfying for the reader. Positions -- especially the locals' inferiority complex vis à vis the West -- are also occasionally too simply presented.

The elements of the book -- even the dominant snow -- are often creative and clever. From the beginning of a science fiction novel written by one boy to the complex affair between Ka and Ipek to the shadow of the suicides hanging over the entire story, Pamuk offers much that impresses and moves the reader -- but his hold is ultimately also unsure. He tries just that bit too much and too hard, and he can't quite sustain it.

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The New York Times

A Blizzard of Contradictions in Modern Turkey

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; By RICHARD EDER, Published: August 10, 2004SNOW By Orhan PamukTranslated by Maureen Freely. 426 pages

In his last novel, ''My Name is Red,'' the great and almost irresistibly beguiling Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk devised a breathtaking image for the schism in his country's soul between Westernization and the traditional values of Islam.

Set in the 16th century, ''Red'' presents the schism as the incursion of Renaissance painting -- representational, three-dimensional and with an individualist vision -- into the sultan's court. There the flat, stylized and impersonal grace of the traditional miniaturists is upheld as a matter of religion; and Western perspective is abhorred, since, for instance, it could make a nearby dog bigger than a far-off mosque.

The implications go way beyond art. In Mr. Pamuk's pyrotechnics of mystery, murders, eroticism and glittering colors, art is war and civil war among humanity's embattled religious and historical values.

''Snow,'' translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely, deals with the same schism but its setting is political. It is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor and more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author's same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment

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of an explorer, lost. All this finds voices through characters whose tactile immediacy fades imperceptibly into a fog of ambiguousness and contradiction.

Often we don't know where we are, only to realize that this is exactly where we are: in Mr. Pamuk's vision of a Turkey unable to know itself. The fight has gone on too long and run too deep: a schism not of two distinct sides but of two sides existing within a single consciousness, one that is both the nation's and the author's. Educated abroad, trained in Western literature and culture, he is caught in the entwined roots of tradition and modernity, each choking the other.

Culturally and politically Mr. Pamuk is a Westerner, but he is shattered to see his beliefs embodied in the methods used by the heirs of Kemal Ataturk who, grown dictatorial and often corrupt, have tried to force their secular code upon a vast Islam-bred rural and urban underclass (no turbans, fezzes or head scarves). In an epigraph he quotes Dostoyevsky's sardonic rendering of Russia's own modernizers: ''Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.''

Ka, the protagonist of ''Snow,'' could not bear the consequences if the popular will turned out to be fundamentalist. He is not so much the author's alter ego as his emissary to the wilder, zanier shores of a dilemma that by now is more than his own and Turkey's. It shows itself these days in a number of countries, including the one where the United States has engaged itself so chaotically. Trying to democratize, that is, yet most likely unwilling to accept the likely failure that would follow an unlikely success.

A blocked poet and onetime radical, Ka returns from Germany after 12 years' exile to get back in touch with his country. A newspaper assignment takes him to a town near the Georgian border to investigate a rumor, mostly exaggerated, about a wave of schoolgirls who killed themselves when ordered to remove their head scarves.

In his picaresque wanderings through the streets, symbolically blurred and isolated under a weeklong blizzard, he goes from one encounter to the next. Some are sinister, some alluring, some surreal. A dog, a charcoal-colored match for the German overcoat Ka proudly wears, persists in following him around as if to mock his Westernizing vanity. Each meeting is a dissonance, a clue to a puzzle he can't make out.

He finds a vicious paramilitary killer who claims to be upholding Ka's own civilized values against the prospect of a Turkish Iran. There is an old Communist who tolerates a daughter's head scarf as a rebellion against the establishment, and a newspaper editor who publishes as past events those that are still to take place. And -- partly a magical-realist touch and partly an acid satire on the press -- publication seems to make them take place.

Ka is moved to anguish by Necip, a young fundamentalist of surpassing sweetness who is afraid he will lose his faith (though he's killed before he can). He is chilled and infuriated by Blue, a lethal yet childlike underground activist.

Most extravagantly, and it is the novel's garish, extended climax, he becomes involved with Sunay, a theater impresario and former leftist who now seems to work on behalf of the military ultras pledged to the secular Ataturk tradition. Sunay organizes a crude anti-Islamic vaudeville that incites a near-riot. This provides the excuse for the local army garrison to mount a minicoup and arrest, torture or kill Islamists and Kurds. Controlling it all, the impresario glories in having achieved a supreme work of art, one whose dramatic culmination will be his own death onstage.

Art, its vanities and its detachment from consequences, is one of the author's targets. But what marks Mr. Pamuk and his targets is that he stands alongside them to receive his own lethal arrows. And he does it with odd gaiety and compassion.

Ka wanders through the town's murderous chaos receiving tidy inspiration and producing 19 poems of exactly 36 lines each. He is a fool of time, but his creator is tender and funny with his fools. Ka is

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doomed finally to betray, and so is the marvelous woman he has a besotted and arousingly depicted affair with; each in a different way is an innocent.

Even the symbols get affectionate treatment. Cutting off the town, the blizzard may stand for the isolation from any universal truth or value; one that history seemingly requires by history while it conducts its contorted affairs. The snow, though, is of surpassing beauty and hauntingly rendered. For Mr. Pamuk beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors b

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Washington Post

Winter's TaleReviewed by Ruth Franklin, Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page BW06Translated from the Turkish by Maureen FreelyKnopf. 426 pp

"Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore," Stendhal wrote. This line serves as one of the epigraphs to Snow, Orhan Pamuk's mysterious, moving and -- yes -- political new novel, which includes a scene where guns are shot into a theater audience. Firearms notwithstanding, there is nothing crude about Pamuk's subtle work. The author of seven previous novels, he has taken as his great subject the tensions between West and East, religious and secular, in his native Turkey. His most recent novel, My Name Is Red, was an ingenious, tightly crafted tale of murder among miniaturists -- artists who illuminate manuscripts -- in 16th-century Istanbul, for which he at last garnered much-deserved recognition in the United States.

Snow, which takes place in the present day, may be Pamuk's most topical novel yet. Ka, a poet from Istanbul, has returned to his native country for a visit after 12 years in exile in Germany. When Snow begins, he is on a bus en route to Kars, a mountain city in the "poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey," at the former border of the Ottoman and Russian empires. An old friend at an Istanbul newspaper has asked him to report on the impending municipal elections as well as an epidemic of suicide among teenage girls, the latest of whom is one of the "head-scarf girls," a group of young women who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair. In hope of reuniting with Ipek, a beautiful former classmate who now lives in Kars, Ka agrees.

Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players, including the charismatic Blue, an "infamous Islamist terrorist" who is in hiding after issuing a death threat against a talk-show host who insulted the Prophet Muhammad; Necip, a pious student who hopes to become the world's first Islamist science-fiction writer; and Ipek's sister, Kadife, the leader of the head-scarf girls. These forces come to a head on Ka's first evening in Kars, when an acting troupe stages a classic play called "My Fatherland or My Head Scarf." At the play's climax, the heroine rips off her scarf and burns it, and the religious youths in attendance begin to riot. Soldiers storm the stage, opening fire and killing a number of the audience members.

This is the briefest possible introduction to Snow's elaborate plot, which works its way by twists and turns through numerous digressions, dialogues and genres. Pamuk's work is reminiscent of the great storytelling classics -- The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron or Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, with their bawdy comedy, intricate design and mystical overtones. At times Ka plays the traditional role of the trickster: In one brilliant sequence, he negotiates a statement of unity between the city's Islamist, Kurdish and socialist leaders for the sole purpose of luring Ipek's father out of the hotel where they live, so that he can make love to her. Elsewhere he is

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compared to a dervish: During his few days in Kars, he regains his inspiration for the first time in four years, and poems come to him as if dictated by a higher power.

The poems that Ka writes in Kars turn out to be governed by a "deep and mysterious underlying structure" similar to that of a snowflake, and the same is true of the novel itself. The deeper you read, the more the symmetries multiply. Nearly every character has a double, down to the narrator himself, who is eventually revealed to be a novelist friend of Ka's named Orhan, telling Ka's story after his death based on information gleaned from his notebooks. All these mirror images add up to create a dizzying effect, which is deepened by the snow that begins to fall on the first page of the novel and does not let up until nearly the end. Practically a character in its own right, it blankets the mean streets of Kars, shutting Ka and Ipek together in their hotel, casting its strange light in unexpected places and closing the roads to all traffic in or out, so that the city becomes a strange hothouse of nervous activity and revolutionary unrest.

This disorientation is surely Pamuk's intention. But even after the novel has come to its wrenching conclusion, the atmospheric haze is difficult to dispel. Snow has none of the tautness of My Name Is Red; its action moves thickly, at times impenetrably. Clarity is not enhanced by a tone that at times jerks wildly from knowing sophistication to faux naiveté. This is a shock after the elegant control of My Name Is Red, and the non-Turkish-reading reviewer is inclined to blame the translator, who is new to Pamuk's work. Nevertheless, Pamuk's gift for the evocative image remains one of this novel's great pleasures: Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow.

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Discussion Questions1. On a scale of one to five, with one being rubbish and five being excellent, how did you rate

this book?2. Did you like the characters in this book? Did you have a favourite one? Were they well

drawn?3. What did you think of the plot? The writing in general? Would you read anything by Orhan

Pamuk again?4. Snow is the dominant image in the novel. What does it symbolise? What does the snowflake

come to mean to Ka?5. Ka's coat is constantly mentioned in this book. What do you think it symbolises?6. The narrator drops hints throughout the novel about future developments and tells his

readers of Ka’s death far in advance of the event. What effect does this achieve? Who is the narrator?

7. Many of the novel’s protagonists are writers: the coup is staged by actors, Ka is a poet, his friend Muhtar is a poet who yearns to be published and Necip aspires to be a science fiction writer. What does the novel have to say about art and politics?

8. Ka is described as a ‘political exile’ but the narrator says that he ‘had never been much of an activist’ (page 4). Why is he in exile? What kind of man is he and what has drawn him to Kars?

9. At least three different perspectives are given on the suicide girls. The deputy governor tells Ka, "What is certain is that these girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy. . . But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves"(page 14); Ipek says, "The men give themselves to religion, and the women kill themselves" (page 35); and Kadife argues that women commit suicide to save their pride [page 112]. Does the novel provide an answer to the mystery of why women are killing themselves?

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10. ‘If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I’d say “Snow reminds Ka of God!”’ (page 62). How does Ka’s attitude towards religious belief change? What brings about that change?

11. Everyone in Kars watches television constantly; they even use the television to watch the coup as it takes place just outside their doors. Given the deliberately theatrical nature of the coup, the uncertainty as to whether the soldiers' bullets are real, and Sunay's death onstage during the second performance, what does Pamuk suggest about the relationship between history and fiction, reality and illusion?

12. ‘If a big German newspaper gave each of you personally two lines of space, what would you say to the West?’ (page 280). What response does Turgut Bey’s question elicit? What does Europe symbolise for the novel’s main characters? How does the Europeanised Ka compare himself to the inhabitants of Kars? How do they wish to be perceived in the West?

13. The wearing of the headscarf symbolises the secular versus religious fundamentalism debate in Snow. The Director of Education says that ‘When a woman takes off her headscarf, she occupies a more comfortable place in society and gets more respect’ while his assassin counters with ‘Headscarves protect women from harassment, rape and degradation’ (page 46). Are there parallels to be drawn between it and the decision of the President Chirac’s administration to ban headscarves in French schools? Can you understand why a woman would want to wear a headscarf? Can you understand why Kadife would want to go onstage and bare her head in Sunay's play?

14. Has reading this novel changed your perspective on Islam or the West? If so, in what ways?15. Almost immediately after the novel opens, the narrator speaks in first person directly to the

reader and concludes his interjection of Ka's "biographical details" with the statement: "I don't wish to deceive you. I'm an old friend of Ka's, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars" [p. 5]. Later, during his report of Ka's conversation with Necip, the narrator says of Necip, "With a childishness that amazed Ka, he opened his large green eyes, one of which would be shattered in fifty-one minutes" [p. 134]. With these direct statements of the narrator's foreknowledge, what happens to the fictional conventions of plot and suspense? How does learning that the narrator's name is Orhan, and that he's written something called The Black Book [p. 425], affect the reader's reception of the story?

16. Ka's mood at the beginning of the story is dreamlike and nostalgic: "As slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world" [p. 4]. Does Ka remain in this state of optimism and seeming innocence throughout his stay in Kars? As an exile, he is moved by a sense of returning home; does he make a mistake by believing himself at home enough to become involved in the affairs of Kars?

17. While Ka and Ipek are having coffee in the New Life Pastry Shop, they witness the murder of the director of the Institute of Education. Discuss the conversation between the Institute director and the young man who has been sent to assassinate him [pp. 38–48]. What are the elements that make the scene so effective?

18. The brief history of Kars on pages 19–21 describes a place at the crossroads of "two empires now defunct," which has seen "endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocity." Despite Kemal Atatürk's westernizing ideology (reinforced brutally by the military), Kars is sunk in poverty and hopelessness; its bourgeoisie has fled. Muhtar says, "The city of Kars and the people in it --- it was as if they weren't real. Everyone wanted to die or to leave. . . . It was as if I'd been erased from history, banished from civilization" [p. 53]. How has the town's history shaped its inhabitants' ideas about themselves and their future?

19. Ka's conversations with Muhtar, Blue, the boys from the religious high school, Sheikh Efendi, and Kadife [chapters 6, 8, 9, 11,13] explore the gap between traditional Islam and Western

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secularism. How do these conversations affect Ka's sense of his spiritual condition? How strongly does he need to identify himself as a secular intellectual, and why is the possibility of his own belief in God, which he admits to, so unsettling to him?

20. Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" [The Eighteenth Brumiare of Louis Bonaparte]. In the novel's most farcical and tragic moments, theatrical impresario Sunay Zaim and his allies the military police stage their own intervention in the history of Kars. Does Pamuk, in these episodes so central to the story, seem to share Marx's pessimism?

21. Blue tells a story from the ancient epic Shehname: "Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart. . . . But now, because we've fallen under the spell of the West, we've forgotten our own stories" [p. 78]. What does he imply when he asks Ka, "Is this story so beautiful that a man could kill for it?" [p. 79]

22. At least three different perspectives are given on the suicide girls. The deputy governor tells Ka, "What is certain is that these girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy. . . . But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves" [p. 14]; Ipek says, "The men give themselves to religion, and the women kill themselves" [p. 35]. Kadife argues that women commit suicide to save their pride [p. 112]. Does the novel provide an answer to the mystery of why women are killing themselves?

23. Speaking with Muhtar, Ka says, "If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I'd say, ‘Snow reminds Ka of God!' But I'm not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow" [p. 60]. Why does the snow make Ka think of God? How do Ka's thoughts about his own religious beliefs change throughout the novel?

24. In getting involved with the various factions in Kars, does Ka act on his own behalf, or as the pawn of others? Is he actually, and knowingly, a double agent? As the plot progresses and Ka is moving back and forth between rival groups, what becomes most confusing? Does the reader's experience mirror Ka's spiritual and moral bewilderment?

25. When he travels to Kars, Ka enters another world: "Raised in Istanbul amid the middle-class comforts of Nisantas . . . Ka knew nothing of poverty; it was something beyond the house, in another world" [p. 18]. In the meeting at the Hotel Asia, a Kurdish boy says, "I've always dreamed of the day when I'd have a chance to share my ideas with the world. . . . All I'd want them to print in that Frankfurt paper is this: We're not stupid, we're just poor! And we have a right to want to insist on this distinction" [p. 275]. Later, Orhan asks, "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?" [p. 259] Why are these statements so central to the problems of empathy and ethics presented in the novel?

26. Does the epigraph from Dostoevsky --- "Well then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people" --- sum up the West's arrogant approach to fundamentalist political movements? How is it relevant to the events in Kars?

27. Everyone in Kars watches television constantly; they even use the television to watch the coup as it takes place just outside their doors. Given the deliberately theatrical nature of the coup, the uncertainty as to whether the soldiers' bullets are real, and Sunay's death onstage during the second performance, what does Pamuk suggest about the relationship between history and fiction, reality and illusion?

28. Does Ipek love Ka, or does she still love Blue? Does she betray Ka by not going to Frankfurt with him [pp. 388–90]? In an unsent letter, Ka wrote to Ipek, "I carry the scars of my unbearable suffering on every inch of my body. Sometimes I think it's not just you I've lost, but that I've lost everything in the world" [p. 260]. Was it foolish of Ka to think that he would

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be able to have the happiness that love provides? Why does Ipek decide not to go to Germany with him?

29. "Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and ten minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and vanish. . . . Ka decided that snowflakes have much in common with people. It was a snowflake that inspired ‘I, Ka'" [pp. 375–76]. The poems that Ka writes in his green notebook while in Kars (kar means "snow") align with the points on a snowflake. These poems, however, are never recorded in the novel. How seriously should a reader take Ka's efforts as a poet? What is the significance of the fact that the poems are not available to the reader, but instead we have a novel called Snow?

30. In several of his novels, Pamuk has created characters who are doubles or alter egos. Here he gives us Ka and the narrator as well as Necip and Fazil. Late in the story, the narrator follows Ka's trail on a reading tour through various German cities; he wished "to do exactly as Ka had done on his own tour seven weeks earlier. . . . I would wander through the cold empty city and pretend I was Ka walking the same streets to escape the painful memories of Ipek " [p. 378–379]. Upon following Ka's trail to Kars, he notes, "I shouldn't want my readers to imagine that I was trying to become his posthumous shadow" [p. 380]. What do these statements imply?

31. How is Kadife different from her sister Ipek ? What motivates her to go onstage and bare her head in Sunay's play? Is she a devout Muslim, or is wearing the headscarf simply a costume necessary for her love affair with Blue?

32. Reexamine Necip's story [pp. 104–7] once you've reached the end of the novel. Has Necip's tale foreseen the revelations about the narrator and his love for Ipek, as well as Fazil's marriage to Kadife? How does Necip live on after his death? How does Ka?

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