Snow

The Snowbound City

Ka—the poet, the exile, the man who has spent twelve years in Frankfurt writing almost nothing—arrives in Kars by bus, at night, in the middle of a snowstorm. Kars is on Turkey’s eastern border, near Armenia, and it is one of Turkey’s most historically layered and economically marginal cities: once part of the Russian Empire, its Russian-era buildings still standing alongside Ottoman ones, now frozen in more ways than one. The snow will not stop for three days. The roads into and out of the city are closed. Whatever happens in Kars will happen in isolation.

Ka has come for two reasons. Officially, he is a journalist covering the suicides of young women who have been expelled from school for refusing to remove the Islamic headscarf. Privately, he has come to see İpek, a woman he knew as a student in Istanbul, now divorced and living in Kars with her father. The two reasons cannot be separated—political observation and private desire are entangled from the first page—and this entanglement is the novel’s central formal principle. Ka is not a hero. He is a precise portrait of a particular kind of secular Turkish intellectual: sensitive, well-meaning, fundamentally unable to commit, drawn to beauty and safety in roughly equal measure. His twelve years in Frankfurt have protected him from the conflicts that define Turkish public life, and his return to Kars drops him into those conflicts without giving him the beliefs or courage to navigate them. He watches. He tries to be liked by everyone. He succeeds in being trusted by no one.

The love story with İpek is real and not real simultaneously—Ka wants her with an intensity that feels like the full weight of his exile finally finding an object, but his capacity for self-deception is such that the reader is never entirely certain what she feels or what he actually understands about what she feels.

Secularism vs. Political Islam

The young women who have killed themselves—over the headscarf ban, over the gap between what their faith requires and what the secular state permits—are the novel’s moral center, though none of them appear as living characters. They exist only through testimony: their families, their friends, the Islamist men who invoke them for political purposes, the secular bureaucrats who treat their deaths as a social problem requiring management. Ka, interviewing their families, is the only one who genuinely tries to understand them as individuals. He also fails.

Pamuk’s great achievement in Snow is that he portrays every faction with equal complexity and equal skepticism. The Islamist students are not fanatics; they are young people with genuine faith and genuine grievances, who have been systematically excluded from the society that claims to represent modernity. The secular authorities are not heroes of Enlightenment; they are administrators who use the language of progress to enforce a particular kind of cultural conformity. The Kurdish nationalists have their own history of exclusion. The theatrical troupe that stages a coup—live ammunition, onstage, during a performance the audience cannot distinguish from theatre—are secularists who have decided that the only drama worth staging is the seizure of power.

Ka moves among all of these factions, used by each and committed to none. His inability to choose—which is both a character flaw and the novel’s argument about the condition of the liberal intellectual in a society where every position has already been claimed—means that the snow that isolates Kars also isolates Ka from any possibility of meaningful action.

Reading Snow Today

Snow was published in Turkish in 2002 and in English in 2004, and its relevance has not diminished. Turkey’s tensions between secularism and political Islam, between its European aspirations and its Middle Eastern and Central Asian roots, between state authority and religious community, have if anything intensified since Pamuk wrote the novel. He was accused in Turkey of insulting Turkishness for his public statements about the Armenian genocide, and the political pressure he faced after Snow’s publication was itself a demonstration of the novel’s argument about the costs of speaking honestly in a divided country.

The novel sits in an interesting position in Pamuk’s career: more politically direct than My Name Is Red (which addresses the same East/West tension through the sixteenth century), more intimate than his late work. The Nobel Prize in 2006 specifically cited his engagement with the clash and interlacing of cultures, and Snow is the sharpest expression of what that means in contemporary terms. For new readers, starting with My Name Is Red first is often recommended—its formal pleasures are more immediately accessible—but Snow rewards anyone willing to engage with its difficult and urgent central question: what does it cost to stand in the middle when sides are being chosen?

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Pamuk’s most politically charged novel is also his most personal: a snowbound portrait of Turkey’s fractured identity that never reduces any of its subjects—Islamist, secular, Kurdish, Turkish—to the types that political fiction usually requires.