Snow-Orhan Pamuk

Book review

Snow
Orhan Pamuk


Snow. Orhan Pamuk. Faber & Faber, London 2004. ISBN 0571-22065-7 (paperback)



Turkey evokes, and for centuries has evoked, strong and contradictory images and emotions in the European psyche. In past times the exotic rubbed shoulder with the oriental tyrant, and the perfumed amours of mysterious interiors were juxtaposed with savagery, violence and arbitrary cruelty. In today’s Turkey, behind an ostensibly secular and quasi-European country lurk shadows of an all powerful military-security apparatus, and more recently the emerging spectre of political Islam.

It is the interplay of the last two, within the broader Turkish society, and in an area where the military have been savagely repressing the Kurdish movement for national liberation, that Pamuk addresses so poignantly in his novel Snow. And the fact that the “secular”, “western” veneer is so superficial – and so fragile. As he himself said, he wanted to show the hollowness of the notion that “history is taking place in Istanbul” [1].

The book is set in the early 90’s in Kars – a once beautiful city in north east Turkey where imperial Russia and the Ottoman Turkey met, and where the crumbling ghosts of mansions once occupied by wealthy Armenian and Russian merchants are peepshows to a once prosperous era. Pamuk deliberately sets his story in the “poorest section of Turkey”, now nothing less than a “microcosmos of Turkey” [1]. Kars is a forlorn, hopeless place, without future for anyone, including the young recruits in the religious school. In this milieu the Islamist movement takes root.

As elsewhere, the decades leading up to our tale had witnessed the catastrophic consequences of economic liberalisation. Millions of peasants thrown off the land by pro-market policies in agriculture [2]. This excess labour could in no way be absorbed by a shrinking labour force which by 1999 had plunged to half of the working population, from three quarters in 1978 [2]. The excess labour migrated to shanty towns whose population doubled to half of the urban population. Poverty was the only growth industry. In the 20 years before 1999 the share of income of the lowest fifth had declined by a third, and the real earnings of white collar workers had slumped by 2/3 and of industrial workers by 1/3. By 2002, when Pamuk had just finished writing Snow, one in six Turk was on the verge of starvation [3]

In the 70’s various leftist tendencies violently confronted extreme nation-chauvinist groups in pitch battles which culminated in the army coup in 1980 and the massive crackdown on the left and on all other dissident movements. The crackdown was universal. Union membership was halved in the 20 years after 1978 to 14% of the workforce [2] and the prisons were bursting with political prisoners [4]

In Snow, Ka a Turkish poet, exiled to Frankfurt for leftist views, travels to Kars to investigate, for an Istanbul-based newspaper, a spate of suicides in young girls who had taken to covering their hair as a symbol of political Islam, and consequently been barred from school. As he enters Kars a snow blizzard isolates the town for a few days from the rest of the country, during which time a fading, but once famous husband-wife acting couple, with previous left leaning, organise a bloody coup with the help of the MIT (secret police) against the Islamists in Kars on the eve of a mayoral election which the Islamists might have won.

No one comes out of this story totally unscathed, with the exception of an Islamist boy, who is shot dead before we could conclude otherwise. Pamuk does not see material poverty as the only, or even the main impetus, to political Islam. It is the poverty of ideas, and even more the bleakness of the future that makes an absolutist interpretation of Islam so attractive. The articulate Islamist leader “Blue” answers Ka, for whom the discovery of the “love of God he had found here” had “reopened” the “roads on which poetry travels”. Blue shatters his illusions “if you worship God like a European … you cannot even believe you believe. You don’t belong to this country… First try to be like everyone else, then try to believe in God”. And he does not mean just the poverty, but the total hopelessness of existence. Nowhere is the immutamility of life better illustrated than in Kars’ only paper Border City Gazette (circulation 320) whose editor Serdar Bey regularly prints tomorrows news in the afternoon edition – before they had happened.

Even the white Snow, the central theme of the novel, which helps Ka forget the horrors he witnesses, does not effect the emptiness for the inhabitants. It is indeed the two different ways of looking at the snow that distinguishes those who live in Kars and those coming form outside.

The artistic troupe uses the snow-induced temporary isolation to impose its will – in exactly the same way it might have done in the old “Stalinist” days – by force and from above. The death squad is led by ex-leftists who see the Islamists as the main enemy and follow the old left edict of the enemy of my enemy is my friend by doing the dirty work for MIT. To them the army is the last bastion against the barbarism of political Islam.

Blue too is totally oblivious to the snow’s beauty – so focused is he on his ideology. Yet, this hero of the idealistic students in the religious high-school lies about his role in a political murder, and has been (is still?) in a relation with two sisters simultaneously. Pamuk illustrates the ambiguity of all ideological posturings by twinning each person with their double, one who casts a shadow on them. Ostensibly secular Ipak and her Islamist sister Kadife, the ideologically certain Necip and Fazil who has harboured dreaded doubts about his beliefs, and even Ka and Pamuk himself. Ipek and her Islamist sister are objects of desire by almost everyone who cross the pages – each wanting to possess them – but none giving anything substantial in return. Yet even Ipek whose stunning beauty, I believe, embodies the potential beauty and purity of Turkey, echoing Bunuel’s Tristana – the one-legged beauty symbolising the crippled democracy in Spain - also has a dark secret.

Snow beautifully demonstrates another side to the rise in fundamentalism in these countries – the feebleness of the left and of the democratic forces. Or to put it in class terms the feebleness of the bourgeoisie alongside the weakness of the working people. You can see that in Ipek’s father, a veteran left preferring to watch events on the television screen rather than live. And Ka, the progressive intellectual, whose ambiguous position vis a vis the Islamists and the police is central to the story. Pamuk brings himself into the story at the end, hinting at his own vacillation. Perhaps the only heroes in this drama are the suicide girls whose death is described as their only means of expressing their wills, the only route to freedom. They kill themselves without warning in order to be free, even though their religion marks suicide as a cardinal sin. Pamuk seems to indicate death as the sole solution for these girls faced with repression at home and school and the ideological hopelessness. Is that at the core of the mass of suicide bombings in Iraq and Palestine – a supreme gesture at freedom in the midst of eternal hopelessness?

Beyond its insights into the political scene in today’s Turkey, Snow is a joy to read, notwithstanding some scenes and dialogues that are as theatrical, and seemingly artificial. Such are the two set piece theatrical actions taking place in real time television and framing the beginning and the end of the story. And I did miss not reading the 19 poems Ka had revealed to him in torrents, not unlike the divine Quranic revelations to the prophet Mohammad – the little green book he noted them down was presumably confiscated by an Islamist. For those looking for an insight into the roots of such dead end ideologies as Islamist fundamentalism Snow is a must read.



Mehdi Kia

March 2005



1. Pamuk in interview: www.theconnection.org/show/2004/10/20041012_b_main.asp

2. Surhan Cam points to the lifting of tariffs for imports and mechanisation of exports as examples. This was coupled to policies which inhibited their absorption into urban economy – as happened in Iran, Algeria, Egypt and so many other countries on the periphery of global capitalism during the last quarter of the 20th Century. Surhan Cam Taking Turkey for democracy: Fundamentalism, fascism and the EU. Capital and Class 2005;85:1-11

3. Financial Times, December 2, 2002

4. In 2002 there were still 149,000 political prisoners. See Surham Cam 2005 ibid