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October 24, 2004
REVIEW: Love, headscarves and suicide
‘Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European Enlightenment is more important than people’ (Dostoevsky, Notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov)
“HOW much can we ever know about the 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?” Herein lies the heart of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s profound novel Snow. Set in eastern Anatolia, at ‘the end of the world’ as he calls it, famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilization and Russian imperial rule than for its awful weather and carpeting poverty, the book is part-love story, part-political thriller.
It begins in the Turkish border town of Kars in the ‘90s and inventively deals with the conflict between a secular state and Islamic government, the issue of poverty and unemployment, disillusionment, the head scarf and suicide, themes that have preoccupied the novelist who writes in Istanbul which overlooks the suspension bridge that links Europe and Asia.
Raised in Istanbul, Maureen Freely, a contemporary of Pamuk’s who is also translator of his novels and knew his family, says: ‘The rapidity of social change in Turkey has been amazing. And it has also been a source of considerable pain and confusion. Everything Orhan writes, speaks of that and the debates people are having inside themselves but they can’t quite put it into words. His publishers sent him into hiding at the time when his Dostoevskyian-style novel was released, fearing the consequences of his truthful account.
Acknowledging his overwhelming popularity — a Pamuk novel has more in common with the release of a Hollywood film than the publication of a book — the Impac winning novelist was shocked when The New Life sold 164,000 copies in its first year; the print run for My Name is Red was the largest ever in Turkey; and Snow sold 100,000 copies. Many buy him because it appears fashionable colluding with critics of political Islam who visualize Turkey’s future within Europe as Pamuk has repeatedly supported in interviews, also remaining outspoken on the country’s human rights record, including women’s rights and Kurdish rights.
“When my sales went up, my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared”, he says. “And I haven’t been given any prizes in Turkey since the age of 35. I started to get harsh and envious criticism and I now don’t expect to get good reviews any more.”
Snow is about an uninspired poet Kerim Alakusoglu, or Ka, visiting a remote town on the pretext of a journalistic assignment from the secularist newspaper, the Republican, to cover the municipal elections and apparent suicide epidemic among the Muslim women, when he returns after many years of exile from Frankfurt to attend his mother’s funeral in Istanbul. Pamuk’s protagonist is melancholic, almost secretive, as he resides at the Snow Palace Hotel, half-heartedly investigating the suicides of ‘headscarf girls’, discovering through interviews how the people are divided in their loyalties to the Turkish state and the rising Islamist parties, by religion and atheism.
Like Pamuk himself, he is a middle-class Istanbulite, an educated, westernized Turk everyone sees as a non-believer who is more readily able to fall in love with the beautiful Ipek, the daughter of Turgut Bey, the socialist owner of the hotel: yet it is in Kars where he sees God in both the snow and his own poems, which come to him like rain-filled clouds of inspiration, enabling him to compose them at intervals in a green notebook.
Ka unknowingly becomes part of a love triangle, pitting the atheist poet against the forceful fundamentalist, whom he meets clandestinely, negotiating matters political, sentimental and in the end, bizarrely theatrical with the Islamist accused of masterminding the murder of a college professor.
There is a poetry recital by Ka at the National Theatre, his first in years, unexpectedly followed by a military coup, killing religious school pupils: some residents believe it is a plot against Kurdish nationalism and an attempt to keep the ‘religious fanatics’ away. Snow was criticized in Turkey for its caricatures: the exhausted leftist, the brainless policeman, the head-scarf passionaria, the miserable Anatolian. Blue, the handsome terrorist, with the gift of the gab, a 70s styled actor-manager and his wife who tour towns staging revolutionary plays, and Serdar Bey, the local newspaper editor who writes on events the day before they occur are winning characters.
The finest sentences in the novel are entirely without embellishment. Pamuk knows this will work, dramatizing a discordant scene in which a group of leftists, Kurds and Islamists gather in a hotel room to write a letter to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He also pre-empts his critics when Serdar Bey of the Border Gazette accuses Ka of being ‘ashamed of being a Turk that you hide your true name behind the fake, foreign, counterfeit name of Ka’.
An Islamist student warns Orhan near the epilogue: ‘I’d like you to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.’ So the players in the story, including Ka, are cast in a shadow of indeterminacy, which makes the novel even more compelling.
Nonetheless, Pamuk gives voice to everyone involved: reactionaries, terrorists, liberals, fundamentalists. It is a fiercely spectacular tour de force, in the vein of Marquez and Calvino, synonymous with post-modern literary forms, where he puts his finger on something that relates to Turkey, but Pamuk has a resonance far beyond the country and the time he is writing about.
Snow
By Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber
ISBN 0571220657
436pp. £12.00
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