Isolated from the World

Snow 

by Orhan Pamuk

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another 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?”  ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the small Turkish town of Kars, isolated from the rest of the world for three days by a snowstorm. The plot of the novel is as intricate and symmetrical as the pattern of a snowflake. As narrated by Pamuk himself, he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves, but also seeking Ýpek, a woman on whom he had a crush many years before. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found.

This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore.

Though slow reading at times, Snow has considerable appeal as a satire of a paralyzed society in which political and social groups are either too weak or too fanatical. Locked in perpetual conflict, none of them can establish a nuanced stance or interact, except violently. Consequently, over the course of the novel, the dilemma of each character becomes bleaker, each caught between the violence of Islamic radicalism and government crackdowns. Some Western readers, often seeing themselves as the victims, may gain a more nuanced grasp of the conflict and the almost impossible situation in which the people of the Middle East find themselves. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.