Secularists and Islamists Battling for Control in Frontier (NE) Turkey in Orhan Pamuk's "Snow"

Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, Orhan Pamuk (born in Istanbul in 1952) is a difficult writer, who has said that the book that most influenced him was William Faulkner's (1929) The Sound and the Fury , a novel told from multiple perspectives. Like Faulkner, Pamuk writes of a vainglorious defeated country/society. Unlike Faulkner, Pamuk's novel generally center around writers (The Black Book) or other kinds of artists (My Name Is Red ). Kar (Snow ) written between 1999 and 2001, published in Turkish in 2002 and in English in 2004 centers on a poet who had been a political exile in Frankfurt, returned for his mother's funeral in Istanbul, and got himself accredited as a journalist to investigate girls who were committing suicide in Kars, the major city of northeastern Turkey.

The local school administrator, whose assassination the poet witnesses early on, banned girls wearing headscarves from the school. One puzzle for the poet(who has turned his initials into his name, Ka) to try to solve is how the motivation for these suicides can be religious (Islamic) in that suicide is firmly forbidden in the Qu'ran. The corpses have been barred from Muslim cemeteries not for baring their hair, but for having killed themselves.

In the upcoming local election, it seems likely that the Islamist candidate, Muhtar, will be elected mayor. Ka and Muhtar were university acquaintances and Ka was enamored with the woman, Isek, who married and divorces Muhtar and is living in the hotel where Ka stays, along with her former leftist father and a sister who is having an affair with an Islamist branded a "terrorist," who goes by the name of Blue.

The long-dried up Ka both proposes to and propositions Isek and desperately wants to take her back to Frankfurt to live happily ever after. To get out of town alive, following a local coup, is forced to mediate between Kemalists (secularist followers of Ataturk), Kurdish separatists (branded "communists"), idealistic young students from an Islamic boarding school, and the Islamist "terrorist" Blue. A very wild card is an actor more than complicit in the coup who has dreamed of putting on his own version of Thomas Kyd's (1581) "Spanish Tragedy" (adapted as "Tragedy in Kars") that, like a 1920s agit-prop Kemalist play against head-scarves will be broadcast live from the city's main theater (built by Armenians).

Though it has some very thick stone-walled mansions and public buildings dating from Russian occupation (1871-1918), Kars has a lot of shacks. The area is devoid of trees and outside the city are sod(-roofed) houses. Sheep dung is the major fuel, though when I was there a few weeks ago, households that have pledged their votes to the ruling Islamic party had green plastic bags of coal outside.

The conflict between supporters of the secular Republic and an Islamic state are as acute now (before the June national elections) than they were when Ka (and Pamuk, something of a double for Ka who also journeyed to Kars and took the same precaution of presenting himself to army and police headquarters) was embroiled in local intrigues (romantic and political0 and longings of all sorts. I didn't see tanks in Kars, though I'm sure that some are there. (They were very visible further south in territory inhabited mostly by Kurds.)

Though I thought the novel was too long (fearing bogging down as I had in My Name Is Red and surely would have in The Black Book if I had not been determined to read it while I was in Turkey), I also thought that it had many vivid characters, some with only walk-on (and be shot) roles. Pamuk did not caricature the secularists and the Islamists -- or those seeking love and personal happiness. As a result, the book dismayed both Islamists and as having human complexity.

In a New York Times interview, Pamuk said: I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting -- . The problem of representing the poor, the unrepresented, even in literature, is morally dubious. So in this political novel, my little contribution -- if there is any, I have to be modest -- is to turn it around a bit and make the problem of representation a part of the fiction too."

Within the novel is the following elaboration of the last point: "How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them?"

Though there is definitely a metafictional aspect to a book that I was told in Kars had recognizable local characters (neither "Blue" nor Ka are local, and on a city tour the guide, who pointed out several locations from the novel, claimed that "Blue" was not a character who could exist in Kars, though such fanatics operate elsewhere in Turkey -- ), and the narration gives away some of what is going to happen, there was enough plot(s) to keep me going, and I'd think others who are interested in the "clash of civilization" (atheist modernity vs. traditions, some dubious, of rigorist Islam, and mapped by the Islamists into a correspondence of individualism opposed to communalism) beyond those interested in how they are playing out in Turkey.

Pamuk seems to me overly enamored with doubles/doubling, including the master/slave dialectic (in a non-Hegelian fluidity in The White Castle, the half-brother taking over the apartment and column of the half-brother who has run off with his wife in The Black Book , the pair of sisters, the pair of students, the narrator Orhan following his friend's path to and in Kars, and (tripling?) the would-be poet ex-husband of Isek, Murhat.

John Updike read Snow as an amalgam of Calvino and Kafka (specifically The Castle, though K. is the focus of The Trial , as well). I see it as closer to Dostoevsky and Bolano (doubting that Pamuk had read any Bolano when he wrote Snow) in contemporary Turkey, where the army remains the champion of secularism, and freedom of speech and freedom of the press are severely circumscribed.