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Snow
THERE is no better companion than a book during a long train journey. I would not have bought Orhan Pamuk's Snow but for the fact that he won this year's Nobel for literature. In the end, it turned out to be an engrossing book taking away the journey’s tediousness. The Nobel-worthiness is manifest in the narration, the treatment of the subject, the development of characters and the denouement. There is an overabundance of snow in Snow which begins with poet Ka journeying to the Turkish border town Kars after attending the burial of his mother. Twelve years of exile in Germany had virtually made him, what Albert Camus calls, an "outsider". His visit to the impoverished town where the architectural remnants of the once vast Ottoman empire stand cheek by jowl with an empty, grand Armenian church and where pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic, are preponderant has two purposes. Ka is delighted at the prospect of meeting Ipek, a beautiful old flame, now divorced from her husband, who is an Islamist politician and a onetime friend. When he checks into the shabby Snow Palace Hotel where Ipek too stays, there are opportunities for their love to blossom. But their relationship never goes beyond amorous dalliances because Ipek does not want to make love in the same building where her father also stays. The love rekindles the poet in him and he sees poems all around, in the snow and in every situation he comes across. He constantly dreams of marrying Ipek and taking her to Germany to live a life of happiness. But in Kars, Ka also passes off as a freelance journalist on an assignment to report the phenomenon of young girls committing suicide because they are not allowed to wear headscarves, proscribed under Ataturk’s ruthless modernisation. He finds incomprehensible ordinary girls leading perfectly ordinary lives hanging themselves to death as routinely as having their dinner. The girls are protesting against a college that does not allow them to wear the headscarves in its precincts. The state is hesitant to admit the cause of the suicides as it is a slap on its secularism. So are the Islamists, though they go to the extent of shooting at point-blank range the principal of the institution in question. They are embarrassed about the serial suicides because no true Muslim has the right to take her own life under any circumstances. Snow is as much about the contradictions inherent in Turkish society as it is about Ka's own inability to reconcile himself to the countervailing pressures of Islam and the European enlightenment. In Kars, the state authorities are wary of him because he comes from Istanbul, has lived in Germany and is a journalist. They feel threatened by the Islamists, one of whom says, "To play the rebel heroine in Turkey, you don't pull off your scarf, you put it on". The Islamists are not comfortable with Ka, either. They consider him an atheist and all his protestations of the "love of God" he has felt in Kars does not satisfy him. Resurgent Islam does not give any scope for half-believers like him and Ka is warned: "If you want to save your skin, I would advise you to increase your faith in God at the earliest opportunity. It won't be long, I fear, before a moderate belief in God will be insufficient to save the skin of an old atheist". His encounter with Blue, the Islamist leader, and the religious-driven murder he witnesses leave him with both fear and self-doubt about his own religious convictions. He can neither deny his own Islamic ancestry nor abandon his belief in the Enlightenment values. He is a misfit both in Frankfurt and Kars. The conflict is everywhere. Even Ipek's family is a victim. While it was the insistence of her husband that she wear the headscarf that broke off the two, her equally beautiful sister Kadife is active in the Islamist movement and is a strong believer. The ruthlessness of the state in dealing with the Islamists during the performance of Ataturk-era play "My Fatherland or My Head Scarf", where Ka reads his poem 'Snow', is matched by the dogged determination of those who claim to draw their inspiration from the 31st verse of the chapter entitled 'Heavenly Light' of the Holy Quran. Tolerance becomes a casualty on both sides. The narrator of the story is a friend of Ka, who is Orhan Pamuk himself, who reconstructs the story after several years poring over post-mortem reports and other relevant documents. But at times the story is presented as if Ka himself had written it, bewildering the reader. Such aberrations notwithstanding, Pamuk offers a lot more than the poetic eccentricities of Ka. He also provides an insight into how an unguarded, boastful comment of a vainglorious actor is pounced upon to accuse him of blasphemy. Though Ka writes so many poems, not one is given in the book. As recompense, perhaps, there is the skeletal science fiction novel written by a boy whom he befriends in Kars before he is devoured by the "revolution". While Pamuk's brilliance is manifest when he subtly dwells upon the difficulties faced by Turkey torn as it is between tradition, religion and modernisation, he is unable to evoke empathy for Ka, who is uncertain about everything. In contrast is the absolutism of the Islamists. Creativity and cleverness are the hallmarks of the book. Pamuk is at his inventive best when a newspaper publisher publishes an imaginative report about a performance and justifies it, "There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens `85 Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about". In some circles at least
Pamuk's Nobel is credited to Maureen Freely, his able translator whose
brilliance lies in the fact that the reader does not feel that it is a
work of translation. At the end of Snow, I am overwhelmed by the desire
to read Orhan Pamuk’s other books.
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