Birmingham News, AL
May 1 2005
‘Snow’ by Turk writer sure to stir
Books Columnist Susan Swagler
My cover of Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” probably won’t look like yours. A
friend who traveled to Turkey last year brought the book home to me.
My bookmark is his ticket stub from Hagia Sophia. There’s a newspaper
clipping in the book about the bookstore where he purchased it. It’s
a bookstore of some repute – willing to carry books that cause a
stir, books that are banned.
“Snow” is one of those books.
The book angered Islamists and westernized Turks alike when it came
out in 2002. And it promptly sold more than 100,000 copies.
Most certainly a political novel, “Snow” has subjects ranging from
the European Union to Islamic fundamentalism. There’s a poignant love
story here; there’s wry humor and mindless violence.
In the book, a poet and political exile named Ka travels from
Istanbul to the remote border town of Kars in eastern Turkey. As his
bus approaches, a fierce snowstorm closes the roads behind him.
Ka, pretending to be a journalist, travels to Kars to see for himself
this place that is plagued by a “suicide epidemic” amongst young
women (the “headscarf girls,” they are called) and where the
Islamists are expected to win the imminent municipal elections.
This is not a westernized part of Turkey, and so for a number of
reasons it is cut off ideologically from much of the rest of the
country, and indeed, the rest of the world. Especially the “Godless
west.”
The snowstorm makes that separation physically real. Ka says it is
“as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”
It brings to mind a snow globe – we’re looking in, at a comfortable
remove, and those inside know they’re being watched.
It’s all very surreal. During Ka’s short stay in Kars, a rogue coup –
involving a traveling theater troupe – unfolds, and the religious and
political conflicts come to a violent climax.
In the course of writing this book, Pamuk traveled to Kars (a real
city near the Armenian border) in much the same way his character Ka
did. In the 1990s, he secured journalism credentials and got in touch
with the mayor and police so, as he said in an interview, they
wouldn’t “kidnap me from the street and take me to police
headquarters and torture me (asking) ‘What are you doing here?'”
Still, he was followed, and he was picked up for questioning.
You can go to and hear more of this during an interview
with the author. And you can read an excerpt of the book there, too.
Pamuk says that also like Ka, when he visited, he was seen as an
outsider – this in spite of being a native Turk, in spite of being a
famous Turkish novelist.
“I’m coming from the westernized, richest part of Turkey, with my
clothes and with my culture,” he says. “I am a different sort of
person from their point of view.”
There’s a part of the book that is both amusing and alarming. The
newspaper in Kars prints tomorrow’s news today.
Although it’s funny in a way, it also shows the extreme control that
those in power can, and do, exercise.
Asked what he would print in such a paper, Pamuk said he would have
the headline, “The East-West Conflict Was an Invented Thing. It
Doesn’t Exist Anymore.”
But the clash between East and West will not go away, Pamuk says.
Turkey is a critical U.S. ally; the East-West conflict there is very
real. “Snow,” even though it is fiction, might help us understand
this more.
Susan Swagler’s book column appears Sundays in The Birmingham News.