The poetry of defiance

In February 1992, depressed middle-aged poet Kerim Alakushowlu, who prefers to be known as Ka, from his initials, has come back to Turkey for his mother’s funeral after 12 years in Germany as a political exile. Learning that an old college classmate, the beautiful Ipek, has separated from her husband and is living in the poverty-stricken northeastern border town of Kars, Ka decides to go there to woo her. An old friend who works for the Republican newspaper hires Ka to report on an epidemic of suicides among girls being pressured to stop wearing the Islamic head scarf and on the upcoming municipal elections, which the political Islamists are expected to win.

Thus begins Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow,” his seventh novel, and the fifth to be published in English translation. The snow that falls steadily throughout the book has a magical effect on Kars, concealing the evidence of poverty and decay, highlighting the beauty of the old Russian and Armenian buildings, making everyone feel closer together and giving Ka a powerful sense of the presence -- and the silence -- of God. During the next three days, Ka has a staggering series of life-changing experiences: a rapturous sexual relationship with Ipek and encounters with several other remarkable characters, including a charismatic Sufi sheik, a dashing Islamic terrorist and the first Islamist science fiction writer.

After suffering from writer’s block for several years, he suddenly finds himself repeatedly being swept away by an irresistible rush of inspiration, leading him to write 19 poems grouped together under the title “Snow,” whose hidden symmetries he believes somehow encode the mystery of his life’s meaning. And he is present when an over-the-hill actor, frustrated in his dream of starring in a Kemal Ataturk biopic, stages a military coup during a performance of a melodrama titled “My Fatherland or My Headscarf.” Before the snowstorm ends, the coup will result in the horrific torture and murder of many of the town’s Islamists and Kurds. It also will put Ka’s courage and integrity to a test for which he is unprepared and forever destroy his hopes of happiness.

Now 52, Pamuk is a huge celebrity in his native Turkey, as famous as the most popular politicians, arabesk singers and oil wrestlers. His books have broken all previous sales records for works by a Turkish author, both in Turkey and abroad. This is all the more remarkable because his complex, cerebral, multilayered novels of ideas make great demands on the reader. Last year, “My Name Is Red” won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most lucrative prize for a single work of fiction published in English. He is one of the authors most often mentioned as likely to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

In Maureen Freely, Pamuk seems at last to have found his ideal English translator. Freely, a successful novelist, freelance journalist and daughter of the distinguished travel writer John Freely, is the same age as Pamuk. Although born in the United States, she grew up in Istanbul and has known Pamuk since childhood. She captures his eloquent yet conversational tone in English more exactly and unobtrusively than any previous translator.

Thirty years ago, when he first began pursuing writing as a career, Pamuk spent two years working on a political novel about people like himself: “upper-class or middle-class students who went with their families to summer houses but also played around with guns and Maoist texts and had fanciful ideas about throwing a bomb at the prime minister,” as he told British journalist Nicholas Wroe in a recent interview. Before finishing that novel, however, he realized that such a book could probably not be published in Turkey. And even if he were lucky enough to find a publisher willing to take the risk, he might very well end up doing time in jail.

More important, Pamuk’s voracious reading of the best Western authors convinced him that Turkish literature was suffering from an overdose of political didacticism and an almost complete neglect of the aesthetic. He then came up with a brilliant idea: He would continue to write about the Turkish issues he knew best but would adopt the stylistic devices pioneered by such Western writers as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. He thus created a new hybrid form -- the experimental, Western-style novel on Turkish themes -- for which he would become famous.

A central concern in all of Pamuk’s novels is Turkey’s troubled love-hate relationship with the West. Although they differ greatly in their plots, characters and styles, his novels are unified by the constant, obsessive recurrence of two major themes: the problem of identity (how can an individual or a nation remain true to itself while accepting valuable influences from others?) and the problem of representation (Can art truly represent reality? And to what extent is it legitimate for the artist to express his own ideas and personality in his writing?).

Although Pamuk made a conscious decision to avoid commenting directly on contemporary Turkish politics in his novels, his work became increasingly controversial in Turkey, especially after the 1990 publication of his fourth novel, “The Black Book.” Raised in a staunchly secularist home in Istanbul, Pamuk always had viewed religion as superstitious nonsense fit only for the ignorant poor. It was not until he was living in New York in the 1980s that he first became aware of the beauty of Turkey’s rich Sufi literature and began to allude to it in his own writing. This brought him an onslaught of criticism from both the right and the left. Secularists accused him of pandering to the religious right, while Islamists condemned him for treating sacred texts irreverently.

In 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death for the crime of apostasy, Pamuk was the first writer from a Muslim country to speak out in Rushdie’s defense. During the 1990s, he played an increasingly active role in the human rights movement in Turkey. In December 1998, the Turkish government awarded him the title of “state artist,” but he refused to accept the honor. “For years, I have been criticizing the state for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem by force and for its narrow-minded nationalism,” he told Time magazine’s Andrew Finkel in September 1999.

It was the dramatic worsening of tensions between the Muslim East and the West that finally led Pamuk to write “Snow.” For the first time in his life, the rise of political Islam in Turkey made him realize that there might be no future for him in his homeland. A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pamuk published the much-quoted article “Listen to the Damned” -- subtitled “It is not Islam or poverty that succours terrorism, but the failure to be heard” -- in the Guardian. In that article, he argues that the gap between rich and poor has reached intolerable dimensions and that “millions of people belonging to countries that have been pushed to one side and deprived of the right even to decide their own histories” suffer from terrible humiliation and spiritual misery. Military reprisals against Islamic terrorists, he says, will only make matters worse: “The problem facing the West today is not to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which remote city, but to understand the poor, scorned majority that does not belong to the Western world.” What is needed, he declares, is to accord them the dignity and respect that all human beings deserve.

That is precisely what Pamuk has tried to do in “Snow.” The novel vividly portrays the cruelty and intolerance of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the representatives of the secularist Turkish state. More important, however, Pamuk has created believable, sympathetic characters representing both sides and has given an eloquent voice to their anger and frustration. These are no monsters but ordinary human beings who actually have much more in common than they would wish to acknowledge. Near the end of the novel, one of the characters tells the narrator, Orhan:

“If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.”

When Orhan protests that no one believes everything they read in a novel, the character replies: “Oh, yes, they do believe it.... If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.” *

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From Snow:

Veiling as it did the dirt, the mud, and the darkness, the snow would continue to speak to Ka of purity, but after his first day in Kars it no longer promised innocence. The snow here was tiring, irritating, terrorizing. It had snowed all night. It continued snowing all morning, while Ka walked the streets playing the intrepid reporter -- visiting coffeehouses packed with unemployed Kurds, interviewing voters, taking notes -- and it was still snowing later, when he climbed the steep and frozen streets to interview the former mayor and the governor’s assistant and the families of the girls who had committed suicide. But it no longer took him back to the white-covered streets of his childhood.... Instead, the snow spoke to him of hopelessness and misery.