Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. Snow was published in English in 2004. It's set in Kars, a small Turkish city in the far eastern part of the country. At the heart of the story is a poet/journalist named Ka who emerges from exile in Germany. He's apparently in Kars to write about Muslim school girls committing suicide rather than complying a state order to remove their headscarves. In the process he rekindles an old love and meets Islamist revolutionaries and odd secular loyalists. The novel is a long and complex meditation on love and politics, familiar tensions between religious values and secular ones, and the poet's vocation in a troubled world. While the story's taut and tense and moves quickly, it's not a simple read. Ka explores strange horizons of empathy and jealousy, and his investment in all this requires the reader's courage as well. Is it even possible to identify with a terrorist's despair? Is a reactionary military coup understandable on any level at all? Can a poet, an artist, a writer remain above the push and pull of ideas and loyalties? Is that the point?
I'm preparing for a 6-week trip to Turkey and the Middle East later this spring. Snow doesn't answer many questions, but provokes instead curiosity, a certain amount of sadness and still more bewilderment. Maybe that's the landscape, the only landscape, where compassion is really possible. Where hope may yet be born.
