In 2008 during the annual book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, novelist Orhan Pamuk criticized how the Turkish government treats writers and artists. He was well aware that Turkey's president, Abdullah Gul, was in the audience that day: "A century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into prison or killing them or branding them as traitors and sending them into exile, and continuously denigrating them in the press–none of this has enriched Turkish literature."
Against this backdrop of oppression, Pamuk has written passionately about the beauty and horrors of his homeland, Turkey. His country inspires his art and has become the canvas for displaying his great literary gifts. And like two of his predecessors, Pearl Buck in China and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the former Soviet Union, who have also won the Nobel Prize for fiction, he has lifted the veil on an obscure corner of the world.
His ironic vision of his homeland is on full display in his novel Snow, published in 2004. Set primarily in the remote Turkish city of Kars, on the northeastern border of Armenia and Georgia, the book tells the story of Ka, a 42-year-old poet who is a political exile in Germany. After twelve years abroad, Ka is drawn to return to his country for two disparate reasons. First, a newspaperman has asked him to pose as a journalist to cover the mayoral race and to find out why so many Turkish teenage girls are committing suicide. This sobering assignment is set against his desire to reestablish a relationship with an old college classmate, a beautiful woman named Ipek, who he has learned is now divorced. The realist and the romantic in him are both drawn to this journey.
After a two-day bus trip from Istanbul, Ka arrives in Kars in the midst of a snow storm. Oversized posters, produced by the Department of Religious Affairs, read: "Human Beings are God's Masterpieces, and Suicide is Blasphemy." The secular-minded Ka comes face to face with politicized Islam.
"Ka had grown up in a secular republican family that had no teaching outside of school," we are told. And throughout the book, Ka is asked whether he is a believer or an atheist. While he hedges in his answers to Kars' city dwellers, he struggles to resolve this question within himself. He longs for companionship, authenticity, and beauty: "At most he would feel happy that the world was such a beautiful thing to behold."
This romantic sentiment isn't good enough for the teenage boys from a religious high school whom Ka meets. They are incensed that he questions whether women need to wear head scarves; and they warn him, in a hauntingly foreboding way, that his views could cause great harm.
The ever-falling snow then proves highly symbolic for the political, social, and cultural climate Ka comes to experience. On his arrival to the city, Ka had appreciated the snow for its innocence and purity. But this feeling changes quickly. "Indeed, the snow spoke to him of hopelessness and misery." The author paints a vivid picture of this snow-covered town with its "Russian buildings with stove piping sticking out of every window, the thousand year old Armenian church tower." He writes, "After endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocities, the city was occupied by Armenian and Russian armies at different times and even, briefly, the British." In sum, this city becomes the second character with whom we become intimately acquainted after meeting our protagonist Ka on this multifaceted journey of religion, politics, culture, philosophy, and love.
With Ka, we are drawn into a rich unfolding plot filled with young religious zealots, corrupt political officials, affable sheiks, terrorists, protective fathers, and love-struck daughters. Like Ka, we are not always sure what is true and what is not. And this almost Shakespearean plot thread of what is authentic literally unfolds on stage where two plays are being performed at the Kars National Theatre–and televised for the snowbound city. The dramatic tensions in these scenes are almost palpable.
Yet the dizzying twists and turns of this plot do more than just display Pamuk's abundant novelistic skills. He is bringing to life universal longings and fears. What is the pain and hopelessness for the Turkish girls who choose suicide? Is there a God? Can one find ultimate happiness? Can the great divide of East and West ever be forged?
One admirer has written that Orhan Pamuk has narrated the history of Turkey for the world. In his acceptance speech on winning the Nobel Prize, Pamuk said, "What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come from such fears."
In his novel Snow, Pamuk explores the individual's fears and boasts but also the collective ones of Turkey. His love/hate relationship with his country of origin is on full display in this book. But as a citizen of the East who is comfortable in the West, he has also challenged Westerners to view themselves as others see them. "I also know that in the West–a world with which I can identify with ease–nations and people taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction."
In more than thirty years of writing about his homeland, Pamuk has built an impressive body of novels and plays and a growing international reputation. Yet many Americans have never cracked one of his books. Amidst the competing demands for our leisure time, I recommend reading an Orhan Pamuk novel. After all, Pamuk questions whether we, as Westerners, are self-satisfied. How bitterly ironic it must be for this novelist if we don't even rouse ourselves to engage his concerns.
