Snow

“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 are some of the questions that haunt the narrator in Orhan Pamuk’s book, Snow.

The story begins as Ka, who has been living in exile in Frankfurt, travels to a Turkish border town called Kars to cover the municipal elections for a newspaper and to write a story about the reason why so many Muslim girls have been committing suicide after a ban forbidding them to wear head-scarves. But his real motive is to court and marry beautiful Ipek, his classmate from school who, he has heard recently separated from her husband.

Once he reaches there, a blizzard shuts off the roads leading up to the town. Cut off from escape by snow, Ka wanders wanders through the city reminiscing about the old days. The snow never quite stops falling and becomes the core of the novel. ‘Snow’ is the title of the collection of poems that start ‘coming’ to Ka after his arrival in Kars. The snow, at times takes the form of a blizzard and at others, represents a gentle white blanket covering the architectural remnants of this decaying city.

While trying to find out more about the suicides of the ‘headscarf girls’ he has fascinating encounters with the women’s families, the editor of the newspaper, the police, stage actors, fundamentalists, extremists, kurdish nationalists and the westernized turkish exiles. During a performance in the National Theatre in Kars, there is a military coup staged by an actor Sunay, in which many pupils from the Islamic religious high school are killed. It sets off a ghastly chain of events: the arrest of religious leaders, the murder of fundamentalists and those against “progress”. All through this, Ka looks for happiness with Ipek, with almost like an obsession.

This book is full of fascinating and detailed characters from Ka himself to Blue, a much celebrated Islamic terrorist, Sunay and his wife who tour small towns staging revolutionary plays, Kadife – Ipek’s headscarf wearing stubborn sister and Serdar Bey, a local newspaper editor, who writes about events even before they have occurred. Maureen Freely’s translation is lucid and fluent throughout the book, capturing the beauty of the snow and the city in a way that is almost breathtaking.

More than anything, Snow is a political novel. It tackles the issues of conflict between Islamic fundamentalism and secular Turkey, poverty, unemployment and suicide. There is no right or wrong side here. The author has tried to take in the views of all – fundamentalists, exiles, ex-communists and the nationalists. It is a fascinating novel that provides a view into varied perspectives and conflicts in the lives of the people in that part of the world. This is a book that reads like a dream.

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