Pamuk, Orhan "Snow"

(Turkish: Kar) - 2002

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


Ka is a Turkish poet who lives in Germany but visits a town in Turkey called Kars. While he is there, they have a heavy snowfall and nobody can leave or enter the town. The Turkish name for snow is "kar". What a coincidence!

Anyway, while he staying in Kars, a revolution is taking place in the little city. We can follow the way of this from the early beginnings, we can see every little piece of what those who want to overthrow the government want, what they are prepared to do, and what the government tries to do to repulse them. Because this takes place in a small town, it is easy to see the whole picture.

I know the author is not much liked in certain circles in his country and this is the book where I understand it best. Nobody likes criticism, especially if you know you're wrong. I admire him even more after this book which is certainly not his easiest one.

Orhan Pamuk manages to point out the differences between East and West, to draw a clear images of the political problems Turkey is facing and still writing a beautiful story in the midst of it all. I think I mentioned before that I love this author. Even if I wasn't interested in what is going on in Turkey at all, I still would like to read his books, he has a great writing style. And he manages to create a new world in every one of his books.

From the back cover:

"Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment."

Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Orhan Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2005.


Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Originally posted on Guiltless Reading.

How does one stay whole, sane, live with integrity amidst contradictions?

About Snow by Orhan Pamuk: Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.

My two cents

So here's a review that has been languishing in draft. It's because I couldn't pick up another book for maybe about a week after reading this book: it gave me such a horrendous book hangover. In the best possible way: it provoked, it triggered so much in me. It got to me, ok, pretty hard.

This book is deceiving; it doesn't look all that thick but it is actually 426 pages, and crack it open and the text is tiny! Dense. I struggled to get past that fact in the beginning but once I made it into the second chapter, I was hooked. It is a pithy novel, like someone poured their life into it, and I doubt that's not far from the truth for Orhan Pamuk.

I loved that this was such a challenging read. I find it disconcerting that reviews are polarized. But I understand where people are coming from - it's hard to get around the fact that this is about a depressingly solitary and misunderstood life in a far flung country whose realities I know little about (although sadly, plenty in the news lately). But surprisingly that's what I loved about it: learning and getting out of my comfort zone, and realizing that despite country, culture, religion, everyone is merely trying to live their lives the best they can.

Collage of Kars, Turkey. 
By Kars Church Of The Apostles 2009.JPG: Bjørn Christian TørrissenKars Kalesi1.jpg: Sabri76Kars Panorama.JPG: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen - Derived from other images, as noted under Author, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34628630

Ka's solitary life is cobbled together from the viewpoint of Orhan Pamuk who is Ka's friend. Notice the author insertion here? In that respect, this reminded me of Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco. And like Syjuco's presentation of Philippine history, Pamuk allows us a glimpse Turkey's history, one where religion, politics, and power is complicated and multifaceted. The traditional clashes with the modern; nationalism is at odds with the status quo towards assimilation; Islamic belief, secularism and traditional religion are a contradictory mix; and the Eastern and Western belief systems collide. I wonder: how does one stay whole, sane, and live with integrity amidst these contradictions?

I love how Blue, Kars's resident revolutionary, is able to make sense of the dilemma:

"I refuse to be European, and I won't ape their ways. Im going to live my own history and be no one but myself. I for one believe it's possible to be happy without being a mock European, without becoming their slave. There's a word Europhiles very commonly use when they denigrate our people: to be a true Westerner a person must first become an individual, and then they go on to say that in Turkey, there are no individuals! Well, that's how I see my execution. I am standing up against the Westerners as an individual; it's because I'm an individual that I refuse to imitate them." - p. 314

Yet another dilemma presented is the reality of being a veiled woman in Turkey (sidenote: another book that tackles this on a more personal level is Silk Armour by Claire Sydenham, a book I highly recommend). The contradictions of revolt and freedom, of tradition and constraint is something that women must contend with daily in society to determine their own sense of identity. The rash of suicides of veiled students was an intriguing way of couching this daily struggle.

Poetry throughout, music, theatrical presentations: I reveled in the power of media in informing and agitating people, presenting fact and differing opinions, and affecting change. It highlights the fact that music and the arts is never going to disappear from our lives.

I can't not comment about the obvious theme of snow carried throughout the book -- its coldness and sadness it evokes, the stark white landscapes that it conjures. But also its beauty. Contradictions.

There is so much more to this book that I hate the idea of breaking this review down too much (plus I fear that my not completing this review will end up in my never getting this review up at all!). The most powerful thing for me about this novel is that this got me thinking and asking more questions, of learning about Turkey's multifaceted society and knowing that history shapes the lives of its inhabitants in many ways that we would never imagine possible.

Uh-ohs

There are certain aspects of this novel that raised a red flag in my mind. The most obvious is that this dense tome is intimidating. I actually read this over an entire month, in little manageable bits. I won't deny that it's heavy reading, but so totally worth it!

Another, the snow theme became academic towards the end. It kind of fell flat for me when I saw the diagrams and I thought the author carried it tad far. I often wonder with works like this if things get lost in translation (because this is a translated work), something I can only speculate about.

Setting

Set predominantly in Kars, Turkey, the landscape for this story is a fascinating mix of old and new built upon a history of conflict. Historic accounts and folkloric stories abound in this novel but one needs to read between the lines, do their research, especially if coming in from the cold.

Kars was the capital of the medieval Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia. In the 19th century, it was battled over by the Ottoman and Russian empires, with Russia eventually gaining control. During the First World War, the Ottomans took control of the city in 1918 but relinquished it to the First Republic of Armenia following the Armistice of Mudros. In 1920, Turkish revolutionaries captured captured Kars. The Treaty of Kars was signed in 1921 between the Government of the Grand National Assembly and the Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, establishing the current north-eastern boundaries of Turkey. Learn more here: Wikipedia - Kars, Turkey

Verdict

An intimidating and challenging read about the tragically solitary life of a revolutionary in Turkey. Dense, provoking and allowing for introspection, I highly recommend this for those who'd like to learn more about the history and realities of conflict-ridden countries, and those intrigued by Pamuk's ability to encapsulate the dilemma of national self-identity vis-s-vis personal self-identity in novel form.

***

I read this book as part of the Read the Nobels 2016 Reading Challenge. This is written by Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

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Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

From Sweden I’m moving on to the South of the continent or rather to the European tip of the Bosporus and above all to Asia Minor, in other words to modern Turkey between Black and Mediterranean Sea. As a matter of fact, there aren’t an awful lot of Turkish writers whose work is translated into English or German although as late their number is increasing gradually. For today’s review I picked the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Without doubt the laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 is one of the most renowned authors of his country. 

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in June 1952. Already before graduating in journalism from the University of Istanbul, he dedicated his life entirely to writing. His first novel Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons) won the 1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest under a different title, but was first published only three years later. Several other novels followed until the writer’s big breakthrough came with The Black Book (Kara Kitap) in 1990 which was followed by highly successful works like New Life (Yeni Hayat: 1995), My Name is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı: 1998), Snow (Kar: 2002), and Istanbul: Memories of a City (İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Sehir: 2003). In 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The literary criticism The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (Saf ve Düsünceli Romancı: 2011) is his latest released work. Orhan Pamuk lives in Istanbul. 

The scenery of Snow ("kar" in Turkish) is the Eastern Anatolian town Kars which has seen much better days. It’s in a winter of the 1990s when Kerim Alakuşoğlu, who already as a schoolboy took to abbreviating his detested name as Ka, travels to Kars. Ka is a middle-aged poet of small renown who has been living in political exile in Germany for many years and who suffers from writer’s block. The commission of a newspaper in Istanbul to report about the upcoming local elections in Kars and a series of suicides by young women who refused to take off their head-scarves serves him as pretext to visit the town of his early childhood and to meet his adored former schoolmate İpek. He secretly hopes that the recently divorced will accept to marry him. At his arrival under heavy snowfalls Kars is cut off. The following three days are filled with investigations for articles which Ka doesn’t even mean to write and with courting beautiful İpek. Talking to military, police, Secret Service, secularists, communists, nationalists, moderate Islamists, and the wanted Islamic extremist Blue, Ka is drawn into the thicket of conflicting political convictions. Moreover the aging actor and leader of a travelling theatre group Sunay Zaim, who always dreamt of impersonating Atatürk on stage, takes advantage of being cut off from the world and of a live television broadcast of their performance to seize power in a coup de main executed on stage. Ka doesn’t really care about it, not even the killings and the arrests. He is a poet in love and in the snow he feels the presence of Allah. The writer’s block is broken and poem after poem flows into his pen and into his green notebook. But sooner or later even the heaviest snowfalls stop, traffic connections are cleared from snow and the old order is restored. Inevitably the events have some kind of sequel for everybody who got mixed up in them, for Ka too. 

It isn’t obvious from the very beginning, but Snow is told by a first-person narrator who traces Ka’s every move during those three days in Kars. As the reader learns later on, Ka was shot dead in Frankfurt four years after the events and the narrator, his writer friend Orhan (Pamuk), made it his business to reconstruct the nineteen poems which Ka wrote in Kars and which are lost to the world because his green notebook has disappeared. The genesis of the poems together with Ka’s life story serves the author as the perfect background to touch on the complex political and cultural situation in Turkey, a country between Asia and Europe, between Islamic heritage and western lifestyle, between tradition and modernism. The contradictions manifest also in the great variety of characters with often opposing views populating the novel and in Ka’s inner strife. They are described very carefully and with a certain degree of irony and playfulness. Orhan Pamuk’s language and style remain simple throughout and make it easy to follow the plot. Unfortunately, the protagonist’s poems are revealed only by their titles and by their position on a symbolic snow crystal which is a bit of a let-down. 

As you can easily guess, I enjoyed reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk very much. It shows the dilemma of the Turkish people in search of a new identity which pleases followers of all the different ideological and religious movements present in the area, be it on the national or on the individual level. To me it seems only natural that the topic is on the minds of Turkish writers. Also the novel The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak, which I reviewed almost exactly one year ago, revolves around the difficulties of finding a comfortable place between East and West. As for Snow by Orhan Pamuk, it’s a read which I recommend highly both for its literary quality as well as for the glimpse into the Turkish soul which it allows.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2014/01/snow-by-orhan-pamuk.html