Snow

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 480 pages
• Published by: Vintage July 19, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0375706860
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0375706868
• Book Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 11.4 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
A Turkish poet who spent 12 years as a political exile in Germany witnesses firsthand the clash between radical Islam and Western ideals in this enigmatically gorgeous novel. Ka's reasons for visiting the small Turkish town of Kars are twofold: curiosity about the rash of suicides by young girls in the town and a hope to reconnect with "the gorgeous Ipek," whom he knew as a youth. But Kars is a tangle of poverty-stricken families, Kurdish separatists, political Islamists (including Ipek's spirited sister Kadife) and Ka finds himself making compromises with all in a desperate play for his own happiness. Ka encounters government officials, idealistic students, leftist theater groups and the charismatic and perhaps terroristic Blue while trying to convince Ipek to return to Germany with him; each conversation pits warring ideologies against each other and against Ka's own weary melancholy. Pamuk himself becomes an important character, as he describes his attempts to piece together "what really happened" in the few days his friend Ka spent in Kars, during which snow cuts off the town from the rest of the world and a bloody coup from an unexpected source hurtles toward a startling climax. Pamuk's sometimes exhaustive conversations and descriptions create a stark picture of a too-little-known part of the world, where politics, religion and even happiness can seem alternately all-consuming and irrelevant. A detached tone and some dogmatic abstractions make for tough reading, but Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
"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 gorgeous 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 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.

Reviewed by Ruth Franklin
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Snow (Hardcover) The rich story-telling tradition of the Middle East enlivens Turkish author Pamuk's novel about the residents of Kars, a town in the remote northeast corner of Turkey, once a crossroads for trade between Turkey, Soviet Georgia, Armenia, and Iran, but now a place of enormous poverty. Ka, a poet with writer's block, arrives in Kars at the beginning of a three-day blizzard, sometime in the early 1990s, to investigate a spate of suicides by young women forbidden to wear headscarves in school, but he is also there hoping to reconnect with his life-long love, Ipek, who is now single. All the conflicting political and religious movements of the country are exemplified in Kars--socialism and communism, atheism, political secularism, Kurdish nationalism, and the most rapidly growing movement, Islamist fundamentalism, and Ka comes into contact with all of them. As he investigates the girls' suicides and becomes reacquainted with Ipek, he also witnesses the coffeeshop shooting of the Director of Education, the man who has carried out the government's orders to ban the "headscarf girls" from school. His assailant is a young member of the Freedom Fighters for Islamic Justice, a group Ka comes to know. A military coup at the National Theater begins when soldiers burst in, shoot randomly into the audience, kill a number of people, then round up "dangerous" citizens, including some of the people Ka has visited. Ultimately, Ka's life is in danger, and Ipek must choose whether to go with him to Germany or to stay in Kars. Articulate in its depiction of almost inexplicable contradictions, Snow is not a western novel and does not adhere to western literary conventions of plot or character. The execution of the Director of Education, the army coup, and the follow-up are used primarily as vehicles for exploring the many competing philosophical and political movements, a focus on abstractions rarely seen in American literary fiction. The plot is absorbing for a reader who is interested in politics and religion, but the novel may be slow for readers looking for a plot- or character-based novel. The characters, while intriguing, are more representative of types than individuals. Published in Turkey and Europe before September 11, the novel has an ominous prescience to it. Rich with insights into rapidly rising fundamentalist movements and why they seek our destruction, this haunting novel is many-leveled, beautifully wrought, and complex. Packed with ironies, dark humor, and enough symbolism to keep a symbol-hunter busy for days, this realistic depiction of the environment in which extremist movements take root and flourish is a chilling reminder of how the world has changed. Mary Whipple