ETHEREAL YET ROOTED IN REALITY
Review By Anu Nathan
Malaysia Star, Malaysia
April 9 2006
SNOW
By: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage, 426 pages
(ISBN: 0-3775-70686-0)
THIS is the longest it has taken me to read a book and review – almost
six months. I had to keep putting it down because Snow is not easily
digested. Pamuk is more than a novelist; he is a reporter first and
foremost, and this political novel charts the tumult within modern-day
Turkey. Every time I put down the book because it was threatening
to overwhelm me, I was forced to pick it up again, not just because
Pamuk’s name and face jumped out of newspapers and magazines, but
because I was compelled to read on till the end.
Cliched as it may sound, Pamuk is no stranger to controversy.
Recently, Turkish authorities had charged him with “insulting
Turkishness” for talking about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the
massacre of 30,000 Kurds in Anatolia. Much earlier, in 1995, he was
among a group of authors tried for writing essays that criticised
Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish minority.
Until I visited Turkey last year, I had no idea who Pamuk was, despite
the fact that he is a prolific writer and has been a regular in the
Bosphorus literary scene since the late 1970s. I was strolling in the
Beyoglu district and ventured into a bookstore, hoping to pick up a
book by a Turkish writer. The bookstore owner/manager recommended
Pamuk, who by then had achieved international fame with his book
My Name is Red (about a murderous Ottoman miniaturist), which could
almost be a parallel novel to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Two days after coming home, I found Snow on the review shelf. The
next week a colleague passed me My Name is Red, which only succeeded
in derailing the review of Snow. It seemed there was no escaping Pamuk.
As a novelist Pamuk belongs to that special breed of crossover authors
who manage to sell and achieve critical acclaim – think Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Milan Kundera, Paulo Coelho.
Snow (Kar in Turkish) is a highly-charged political novel that
explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernisation in modern
Turkey and tackles head-on the delicate headscarf issue.
In Kars (the poetic transition of Ka to Kar to Kars is almost a
sublime touch, like the snowflake which the poet clings to), heavy
snow cuts off the Anatolian town from the rest of Turkey just after a
poet called Ka arrives, a pointed reference to the desolate remoteness
of Kars in vivid contrast to forward-looking Istanbul.
Ka, who has for years been living in Frankfurt, futilely trying to
create poetry amid odd jobs to sustain his departure from Turkey, has
been assigned by an Istanbul newspaper to investigate a chain of young
girls committing suicide because, as the local police chief explains,
“they were not allowed to wear headscarves in school.”
Tracing almost lovingly from Dostoevsky (even Kafka comes to mind),
the characters in Snow are all flawed, with some juggling dual
identities. Among them are the Islamist who has no qualms about
keeping a mistress, a former Istanbul socialite who champions the
headscarf cause with idealistic zeal, and the Communist democrat.
Most ruptured is Ka who, in Malaysian parlance would best be described
as a lalang, swaying in whichever direction the wind blows, unsure
of his convictions.
Ka, as we soon find out, is not in Kars to uncover the mystery of the
virgin suicides, but to woo his elusive classmate Ipek, now happily
divorced. Ipek is the only cause he fervently pursues, even as a
flood of poetic inspiration turns on the creative switch which this
washed-out poet had considered dead.
Ka’s footsteps in Kars, Istanbul and Frankfurt are later retraced
by his novelist friend Orhan (Pamuk also includes himself in My
Name is Red), who is determined to detail Ka’s life, understand the
overpowering love he had for Ipek amid troubled times, and his final
days before succumbing to a hail of bullets.
In this didactic treatise, displacement, blind devotion, love and
alienation all jostle to take prime place against a backdrop of the
fleeting, ethereal promise of peace and unity amid differences.
Pamuk is an inveterate storyteller and here, he has woven a magical
tale, sometimes superfluous, but always engaging, about ordinary
Turks affected by decisions beyond their control and how Turkey,
being both blue-eyed blonde and swarthy tries to strike a balance
between Islamism and secularism/modernism.