August 15, 2004
‘Snow’: Headscarves to Die For
By MARGARET ATWOOD
SNOW
By Orhan Pamuk.
Translated by Maureen Freely.
426 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.
his seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times.
In Turkey, Pamuk is the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist and political pundit: the Turkish public reads his novels as if taking its own pulse. He is also highly esteemed in Europe: his sixth novel, the lush and intriguing ”My Name Is Red,” carried off the 2003 Impac Dublin Literary Award, adding to his long list of prizes.
He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of ”Westernization” and those of the Islamists. Although it’s set in the 1990’s and was begun before Sept. 11, ”Snow” is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts.
Like Pamuk’s other novels, ”Snow” is an in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul. It’s the story of Ka, a gloomy but appealing poet who hasn’t written anything in years. But Ka is not his own narrator: by the time of the telling he has been assassinated, and his tale is pieced together by an ”old friend” of his who just happens to be named Orhan.
As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has returned to Istanbul after 12 years for his mother’s funeral. He’s making his way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm begins. (Kar is ”snow” in Turkish, so we have already been given an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist interested in the recent murder of the city’s mayor and the suicides of a number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves, but this is only one of his motives. He also wants to see Ipek, a beautiful woman he’d known as a student. Divorced from a onetime friend of Ka’s turned Islamist politician, she lives in the shabby Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka is staying.
Cut off from escape by the snow, Ka wanders through a decaying city haunted by its glorious former selves: there are architectural remnants of the once vast Ottoman Empire; the grand Armenian church stands empty, testifying to the massacre of its worshipers; there are ghosts of Russian rulers and their lavish celebrations, and pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and instigator of a ruthless ”modernization” campaign, which included — not incidentally — a ban on headscarves.
Ka’s pose as a journalist allows Pamuk to put on display a wide variety of opinions. Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find it hard to imagine the mix of resentful entitlement (We ought to be powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of headroom in such places, and thus in ”Snow.”
Ka tries to find out more about the dead girls but encounters resistance: he’s from a bourgeois background in cosmopolitan Istanbul, he’s been in exile in the West, he has a snazzy overcoat. Believers accuse him of atheism; the secular government doesn’t want him writing about the suicides — a blot on its reputation — so he’s dogged by police spies; common people are suspicious of him. He’s present in a pastry shop when a tiny fundamentalist gunman murders the director of the institute that has expelled the headscarf girls. He gets mixed up with his beloved’s former husband, the two of them are arrested and he witnesses the brutality of the secularist regime. He manages to duck his shadowers long enough to meet with an Islamist extremist in hiding, the persuasive Blue, said to be behind the director’s murder. And so he goes, floundering from encounter to encounter.
In ”Snow,” translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town’s newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka’s public performance of his poem ”Snow.” When Ka protests that he hasn’t written a poem called ”Snow” and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ”Don’t be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . Quite a few things do happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.” And sure enough, inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he’s been in years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ”Snow.” Before you know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ”My Fatherland or My Head Scarf.” As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience.
The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they’re approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile — these are vintage Pamuk, but they’re also part of the modern literary landscape. A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, Garcia Marquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It’s mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.
Women — except as idealized objects of desire — have not been of notably central importance in Pamuk’s previous novels, but ”Snow” is a departure. There are two strong female characters, the emotionally battered Ipek and her sister, the stubborn actress Kadife. In addition, there’s a chorus: the headscarf girls. Those scrapping for power on both sides use these dead girls as symbols, having put unbearable pressure on them while they were alive. Ka, however, sees them as suffering human beings. ”It wasn’t the elements of poverty or helplessness that Ka found so shocking. Neither was it the constant beatings to which these girls were subjected, or the insensitivity of fathers who wouldn’t even let them go outside, or the constant surveillance of jealous husbands. The thing that shocked and frightened Ka was the way these girls had killed themselves: abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday routines.”
Their suicides are like the other brutal events in the novel: sudden eruptions of violence thrown up by relentless underlying forces.
The attitudes of men toward women drive the plot in ”Snow,” but even more important are the attitudes of men toward one another. Ka is always worrying about whether other men respect or despise him, and that respect hinges not on material wealth but on what he is thought to believe. Since he himself isn’t sure, he vacillates from one side to another. Shall he stick with the Western enlightenment? But he was miserable in Germany. Shall he return to the Muslim fold? But despite his drunken hand-kissing of a local religious leader, he can’t fit in.
If Ka were to run true to the form of Pamuk’s previous novels, he might take refuge in stories. Stories, Pamuk has hinted, create the world we perceive: instead of ”I think, therefore I am,” a Pamuk character might say, ”I am because I narrate.” It’s the Scheherazade position, in spades. But poor murdered Ka is no novelist: it’s up to ”Orhan” to act as his Horatio.
”Snow” is the latest entry in Pamuk’s longtime project: narrating his country into being. It’s also the closest to realism. Kars is finely drawn, in all its touching squalor, but its inhabitants resist ”Orhan’s” novelizing of them. One of them asks him to tell the reader not to believe anything he says about them, because ”no one could understand us from so far away.” This is a challenge to Pamuk and his considerable art, but it is also a challenge to us.
Margaret Atwood’s most recent book is ”Oryx and Crake,” a novel.
August 15, 2004
INTERVIEW
Orhan Pamuk: ‘I Was Not A Political Person’
By ALEXANDER STAR
Orhan Pamuk spoke with Alexander Star by telephone from his home in Istanbul.
ALEXANDER STAR: In your novel, Turkey is a somewhat surreal country, where secular nationalists and theocrats compete to impose what seem to be equally dubious ideas of how to force people to be free. Is this the Turkey you know?
ORHAN PAMUK: Well, that gap between my character’s consciousness and the country’s poetic reality is perhaps the essential tension of my novel. I wanted to go and explore both worlds and write about them as they are — the Westernized intellectual’s worldview coming to terms with the poorest, most forgotten and perhaps most ignored part of the country. The most angry part, too.
STAR: A key concern in ”Snow” is the desire of many Muslim women to wear headscarves to school — an issue that raises delicate questions about where you draw the line between, say, the tolerance of religion and the imposition of religion. The current Turkish government has, controversially, attempted to assist the graduates of religious schools. Do you feel that is a legitimate cause for them?
PAMUK: Look, I’m a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don’t think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool — and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That’s what makes writing novels interesting. It’s what makes writing a political novel today interesting.
STAR: And yet your novel expresses a lot of anxiety over whether it’s possible to fully understand the misery and humiliation of people living in unfamiliar circumstances.
PAMUK: Spiritually and morally, I am close to my central character. As he goes to the poorest sections of Turkish society, he falls into the traps of representation — talking in the name of the others, for the most poor. He realizes these issues are problematic. In fact, they may sometimes end up being immoral: the problem of representing the poor, the unrepresented, even in literature, is morally dubious. So in this political novel, my little contribution — if there is any, I have to be modest — is to turn it around a bit and make the problem of representation a part of the fiction too.
STAR: How did you come to write a political novel?
PAMUK: I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous generation of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe, and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand art of the novel. But later, as I began to get known both inside and outside of Turkey, people began to ask political questions and demand political commentaries. Which I did because I sincerely felt that the Turkish state was damaging democracy, human rights and the country. So I did things outside of my books.
STAR: Such as?
PAMUK: Write petitions, attend political meetings, but essentially make commentaries outside of my books. This made me a bit notorious, and I began to get involved in a sort of political war against the Turkish state and the establishment, which 10 years ago was more partial to nationalists. Anyway, I said to myself, Why don’t I once write a political novel and get all of this off my chest?
STAR: Did you have trouble publishing ”Snow” in Turkey? How was it received by Islamists and others?
PAMUK: Before the publication of the book I told my friends and my publisher that I was finishing an outspoken political novel. Shall we show this to lawyers? And they said, No, no, no, now that Turkey is hoping to get in touch with Europe and now that you’re nationally — internationally — ”famous,” you don’t need to do that. O.K. And after some time I gave my publishers the book. Here is the book, I said. And a week later they called me and said they’d read the book, loved the book, but they wanted my permission to show it to a lawyer. They were worried that the public prosecutor might open a case, or confiscate the book before its publication. The first printing was 100,000 copies. They were essentially worried about the economic side of the thing. For example, they hid the book in a corner, so if it were confiscated, they could keep some copies for themselves. But none of these pessimistic things happened. In fact, the country seriously discussed the book. Half of the political Islamists and people who backed the army attacked me. On the other hand, I survived. Nothing happened to me. And in fact it worked the way I hoped it would. Some of those radical Islamists criticized the book with very simplistic ideas, such as ”You’re trying to describe Islamists but you have to know that an Islamist would never have sex with a woman without getting married.” On the other hand, more liberal Islamists were pleased that at least the harassment they had been exposed to by the Turkish Army is mentioned.
STAR: When George Bush was in Istanbul recently for the NATO summit, he referred to you as a ”great writer” who has helped bridge the divide between East and West. Citing your own statements about how people around the world are very much alike, he defended American efforts to help people in the Middle East enjoy their ”birthright of freedom.” Did you think he understood what you meant?
PAMUK: I think George Bush put a lot of distance between East and West with this war. He made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflict cruel and unnecessary pain to lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West. These are things I never hoped would happen. In my books I always looked for a sort of harmony between the so-called East and West. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had been done was a cruel thing.
STAR: Is the novel as a form something you think is alive and well in the Middle East or the non-Western world more broadly? Or do you feel you’re doing something rather unusual?
PAMUK: No, the art of the novel is well. It’s surviving. It has lots of elasticity. I’m sure it will continue to live in the West, in the United States and Europe. But it will have a very strange and new future in countries like China and India, where now there is an unprecedented rise of the middle classes. Legitimizing the power of these new middle classes creates problems of identity both in China and in India. This involves their nationalism when they are faced with the distinct identity of Europe and the West, and their Occidentalism when they are faced with the resistance of their poor people. I think the new modern novel that will come from the East, from that part of the world, will again raise these tensions of East-West modernity and the slippery nature of these rising middle classes in China and India. And also in Turkey, of course.
STAR: In ”Snow,” the radical Islamist Blue remarks at one point that the best thing America’s given the world is Red Marlboros. Would you agree with that?
PAMUK: I used to smoke them a lot when I was young. We distribute our personal pleasures in our characters. That’s one of the joys of writing fiction.
Alexander Star is the senior editor of The New York Times Magazine.
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