Pamuk, Orhan - Snow

“Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.”

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk uses these lines, from Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), to warn his readers: the hot-button political issues in Turkey - religious fanaticism, Kurdish nationalism, receding memories of the greatness of the Ottoman Empire, the power of the military, and the secular state versus the sacred order (issues which Pamuk has scrupulously excluded from his earlier works of fiction) - will be dealt with once and for all in Snow. Pamuk doesn’t use the novel (his most recent) to advance his own position on these matters, the way he has in petitions and interviews. Snow is the work of a world-class novelist, not a polemicist. Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for literature last month, writes about souls.

One such soul is a Turkish poet named Ka. After living in exile in Germany for a dozen years, Ka returns to his homeland to attend his mother’s funeral and also to find a Turkish woman to make his wife. He has one woman in mind: Ipek Hanim, a former confidant from his days at the university, where they were both leftist agitators. Ipek - “with her lightly colored lips, her pale complexion, her shining eyes, her open, intimate gaze” - has an unsettling beauty that has bewitched Ka for more than a decade. Learning that she has separated from her husband (another of Ka’s friends from the university), Ka resolves to woo her and bring her back to Germany. A heavy snow is falling when Ka sets out on the perilous journey to Kars, the isolated border town where Ipek lives; the roads become impassable soon after his arrival. Most of Snow unfolds over the three days the blizzard cuts off Kars from the rest of the world.

An awful lot happens in those three days. When Ka and Ipek are at a teahouse catching up, the director of the Institute of Education, who was condemned to death by the Freedom Fighters for Islamic Justice for barring covered girls from the classroom, is shot right in front of them. This brings Ka’s presence in Kars under the intense scrutiny of the intelligence services, the military, and the town’s network of informers. Ka finds himself the subject of a series of weirdly prescient newspaper articles, written and printed hours before the events they describe. He meets Necip, a student at the religious school who is writing a science fiction novel that explores the transmigration of souls and the place where God does not exist and, like the Border City Gazette, seems to either foretell or determine the future. Necip in turn introduces Ka to Blue, a charismatic Islamicist (and possibly a terrorist) who is also Ipek’s sister’s lover. Ka will be called on to betray Blue in order to ensure his own happiness and safety.

A local military coup initiated by a theater troupe places Kars under the control of the famous actor Sunay Zaim, best known for his portrayal of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, as well an actress who would go on to do voices for children’s cartoons. During a staging and live television broadcast (a technological first for Kars) of the propaganda play “My Fatherland or My Headscarf,” a detachment of soldiers marches to the front. Sunay Zaim announces from the stage that the director of the Institute of Education has succumbed to his wounds. “This lowly murder will be the last assault on the Republic and the secular future of Turkey!” he says. With these words, the soldiers fire into the audience. At first there is confusion as to whether this is all part of the show. But by the third volley the audience realizes that the soldiers are using live rounds. Necip stands up and shouts with heartbreaking naivete, “Stop! Don’t fire; the guns are loaded!” The fourth volley cuts him down.

Ka is mostly indifferent to the “revolutionary fever” that grips the town. He wants nothing more than to sit and look at Ipek. So many years forced to live abroad for only mildly subversive activities has made Ka a sad and solitary man. He is unraveling in Germany. His apartment in Frankfurt is a disaster. He is deep into pornography. He has not written a poem in four years. In Kars he comes to understand that his “intellectual pretensions, political activities, and cultural snobberies” have brought him to an “arid existence” that cuts him off from his feelings.

Ka suddenly experiences a burst of poetic inspiration. He writes nineteen poems in quick succession. He sees a life with Ipek as his last opportunity for a life of happiness and productivity, and he proves to be all too willing to compromise the last shred of his ideals -“fleeing to the margins,” he calls it - to make that happen.

Hanging over all the twists and turns of this dense and sometimes profoundly absurd story is the snow storm. The snow compresses time. It blankets the memory. It binds people together like a shared secret. The snow provides a “deep and mysterious” underlying structure to Ka’s new collection of poems. It reminds Ka, who is an atheist, of “the mystery of creation, of the essential that is life.” The snow might even make him a believer: As he watches some children playing soccer, hears their “shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow,” as he gazes “at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of the streetlights, the desolation of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him.”

And yet, Ka doesn’t pursue these feelings. He comes to reject belief as luxuries for people who live in rich countries. The only important thing is happiness, he proclaims. This cuts to the heart of Pamuk’s political novel. For all its talk of religion and modernity, the central issue here is the pursuit of happiness (and art) in a world filled with injustice. Ipek agrees to run away Ka, but the two lovers must ignore or excuse the misery around them.

When I was about midway through Snow, a friend lent me a collection of poems by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. By chance, I opened right to a stanza that could stand (with Stendahl) as an epigram. The Rilke passage infused the whole second half of Snow with its mournful hues, even as Pamuk’s story of love amidst repression now fills my heart with a gentle sadness, and it serves as a useful summary. From the First Elegy:

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.