Book 19: Turkey (English) – Snow = Kar (Orhan PAMUK)

 

The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus-driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him ‘the silence of snow’.

He’d boarded the bus from Erzurum to Kars with only seconds to spare. He’d just come into the station on a bus from Istanbul – a snowy, stormy, two-day journey – and was rushing up and down the wet, dirty corridors with his bag in tow, looking for his connection, when someone told him that there was a bus for Kars leaving immediately.

 

When the remote eastern town of Kars is snowbound by a blizzard, turning it into a microcosm of Turkey (and, to some extent, the world as a whole), a showdown takes place between the secularists and Islamists who are tugging at Turkey’s soul, culminating in an explosive confrontation between two imperfect worlds. Neither the heavy-handed secular authorities nor the Islamic radicals come off well, but neither are portrayed superficially or without understanding. This novel seems to become more relevant by the day, given the recent election, for this country that is a bridge between East and West, enriched by both but endlessly skewered between the two.

You can read this moving, thought-provoking novel just as a thriller if you like, but there is a variegated landscape under the snow cover and it would be a shame to miss it. This is an important book for everyone.

Incidentally, if you don’t know Turkish you might miss the puns: ‘pamuk’ means ‘cotton’, and ‘kar’ (the title of the book in Turkish) means ‘snow’, so the poet-hero of the book (Ka) should not have been surprised to find the city of Kars in the grip of a snowstorm!

 

PAMUK, Orhan (1952 -), Snow, translated by Maureen Freely, London, Faber and Faber, 2005, ISBN 0-571-21831-8 (originally published in Turkish, 2002)