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  • 'Snow' by Turk writer Pamuk sure to stir

    Birmingham News, AL
    May 1 2005


    'Snow' by Turk writer sure to stir

    Books Columnist Susan Swagler

    My cover of Orhan Pamuk's "Snow" probably won't look like yours. A
    friend who traveled to Turkey last year brought the book home to me.
    My bookmark is his ticket stub from Hagia Sophia. There's a newspaper
    clipping in the book about the bookstore where he purchased it. It's
    a bookstore of some repute - willing to carry books that cause a
    stir, books that are banned.

    "Snow" is one of those books.

    The book angered Islamists and westernized Turks alike when it came
    out in 2002. And it promptly sold more than 100,000 copies.


    Most certainly a political novel, "Snow" has subjects ranging from
    the European Union to Islamic fundamentalism. There's a poignant love
    story here; there's wry humor and mindless violence.

    In the book, a poet and political exile named Ka travels from
    Istanbul to the remote border town of Kars in eastern Turkey. As his
    bus approaches, a fierce snowstorm closes the roads behind him.

    Ka, pretending to be a journalist, travels to Kars to see for himself
    this place that is plagued by a "suicide epidemic" amongst young
    women (the "headscarf girls," they are called) and where the
    Islamists are expected to win the imminent municipal elections.

    This is not a westernized part of Turkey, and so for a number of
    reasons it is cut off ideologically from much of the rest of the
    country, and indeed, the rest of the world. Especially the "Godless
    west."

    The snowstorm makes that separation physically real. Ka says it is
    "as if it were snowing at the end of the world."

    It brings to mind a snow globe - we're looking in, at a comfortable
    remove, and those inside know they're being watched.

    It's all very surreal. During Ka's short stay in Kars, a rogue coup -
    involving a traveling theater troupe - unfolds, and the religious and
    political conflicts come to a violent climax.

    In the course of writing this book, Pamuk traveled to Kars (a real
    city near the Armenian border) in much the same way his character Ka
    did. In the 1990s, he secured journalism credentials and got in touch
    with the mayor and police so, as he said in an interview, they
    wouldn't "kidnap me from the street and take me to police
    headquarters and torture me (asking) 'What are you doing here?'"
    Still, he was followed, and he was picked up for questioning.

    You can go to www.npr.org and hear more of this during an interview
    with the author. And you can read an excerpt of the book there, too.

    Pamuk says that also like Ka, when he visited, he was seen as an
    outsider - this in spite of being a native Turk, in spite of being a
    famous Turkish novelist.

    "I'm coming from the westernized, richest part of Turkey, with my
    clothes and with my culture," he says. "I am a different sort of
    person from their point of view."

    There's a part of the book that is both amusing and alarming. The
    newspaper in Kars prints tomorrow's news today.

    Although it's funny in a way, it also shows the extreme control that
    those in power can, and do, exercise.

    Asked what he would print in such a paper, Pamuk said he would have
    the headline, "The East-West Conflict Was an Invented Thing. It
    Doesn't Exist Anymore."

    But the clash between East and West will not go away, Pamuk says.

    Turkey is a critical U.S. ally; the East-West conflict there is very
    real. "Snow," even though it is fiction, might help us understand
    this more.

    Susan Swagler's book column appears Sundays in The Birmingham News.
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