SNOW / ORHAN PAMUK
“Kar”, is what snow means in Turkish. “Kars”, the easternmost city in Turkey, in the border of Armenia, where the novel takes place is famous for long, harsh winters and rock-solid snow. Kars is perhaps the most cosmopolite city in Turkey with Turks, Kurds, Russians, Germans, seculars, Islamists, provincial and metropolitan, westerners and local cowards and braves, and numerous more, all living together. The theme is a reflector of Turkey’s dark past, the conflict between the secular state and Islamic government, poverty, unemployment and suicides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZcKmv5PKp0
Pamuk’s hero, a dried-up poet whose last 12 years passed in exile in Germany, returns to Istanbul for his mother’s funeral. Then he somehow finds himself assigned to investigate a successive of suicides by woman and girls by an Istanbul newspaper. He learns that they’re committing suicide because of the pressure by the college authorities to take off their headscarves in class.
However, after arriving in the city, it soon appears that Ka is not particularly interested in headscarves or suicides but has come to fall in love with his old schoolmate Ipek, who lives with his father and sister, after getting divorced from her husband. During all this chaos and series of events, Ka surprisingly regains his inspiration after years to write poems.
In this huge confusion, he is drawn in unexpected directions; towards the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hunger for love but also a military coup staged by secularists to rein in the local Islamist radicals. The political struggle doesn’t end, at least not until the snows have melted and violence has run its bloody plan, will Ka discover the fate of his bid to catch the last chance for happiness.
In snow, I observed a Pushkin feeling and, he actually made a reference to Pushkin’s visit to Kars in 1829 -Pushkin’s first and only trip abroad- as a journalist to find out the truth as more than 160 years later Ka does.
Pamuk claims to be not a political writer; however, snow gives us the pure political climate in Turkey at the time. The war inside society.
One of the book’s most moving scenes comes when Ka meets the local Sufi sheikh: “May God bless you for accepting my invitation” said the sheikh “I saw you in my dream. It was snowing.” “I saw you in my dream, Your Excellency,” said Ka. “I came here to find happiness.”
Ka explains to the sheikh his own paradox: he longs for faith but finds it impossible to accept the strictures and backwardness of Islam. “I want to believe in the God you believe in and be like you. But there is a Westerner inside me; my mind is confused” The Shiekh gently consoles him (at one point he jokingly says, “Do they have a different God in Europe”)
Lastly, I want to show you a couple of quotes from the book which excite me.
“There are two kinds of men,” said Ka, in a didactic voice. “The first kind does not fall in love until he’s seen how the girls eat a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she’s angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -and I am in this category- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.”
“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”
Snow is very much deserving of giving a shot. I’m dropping the free ebook version of it. Please do send me your views if you read.
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/51825810/snow-orhan-pamukpdf
