Book review: 'Snow' by Orhan Pamuk

Snow by Orhan Pamuk
First published in Turkish, 2002
English translation by Maureen Freely, 2004
436 pages, £5.99 on amazon.co.uk

‘Snow’ is a beautifully written and very human novel. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk explores religion, politics and art with a set of passionate characters, but the story is mainly about one man’s search for love and happiness.

That man is called Ka. He is a poet who, after years of political exile in Germany, returns to Turkey. He travels to Kars, posing as a journalist sent to investigate the suicides of the so-called ‘headscarf girls’.

Headscarves were banned at the local college, and people believe this is why several ardent Muslim girls committed suicide. But Ka talks to the locals and finds that other reasons probably led the girls to do it, such as the brutality of their fathers.

Thick snow falls and all the transport routes to the remote town are cut off. As the town is hit by a military coup, Ka falls madly in love with Ipek, daughter of the 'enlightened' hotel owner, Turgut Bey.

Interesting characters and wry humour illuminate this novel. For example, Serdar Bey, the editor of the local newspaper, publishes the next day’s news before it happens. And the Islamic extremist Blue is a complex character who stands out for both his brutal conviction and his gentlemanly wiles with women.

Poems come to Ka as if by divine inspiration, and we see him furiously penning them in a public toilet or at the kitchen table. Pamuk alternately pokes fun at artistic pretentiousness and celebrates the electric rush of pure creativity.

Pamuk often digresses from the main plot but this only makes the novel richer. Some books you can’t put down, but I often put this book down just to savour what I had read and to avoid reaching the end too soon.

Kars and its people finally make Ka realise what he wants from life. But at the same time he does not want to shake off the solitude and depression that he knows so well. Will Ka leave his lonely poet’s world for love? Or will raw emotion overtake him?