Snow

A tragic love story beset by political turmoil is the best way to describe Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow. 

I chose to read this novel in January thinking that I would have lots of snowy days and snow surrounding me as I read. But, there has only been one day in which it has snowed since I read this book about the exiled poet Ka's return to Kars.

Ka returns from Germany to investigate why so many young woman are committing suicide in this border city of Turkey but secretly hopes to take away a woman he has been in love with for a long time. The city is shut down to the outside world because of a snow storm. Before coming to Kars, Ka had been unable to write a single poem in his exile. However, during his time in Kars, he was able to write 19 poems but all of which were lost so there only remained descriptions of them.

The story is mainly told through Ka's eyes, but every once in a while especially toward the end -- Orhan narrates the story as he was told it by those who had witnessed the events in Kars those few days. 

Snow is with us from the beginning of the novel and makes itself a dominant character throughout the entire novel. The opening lines are "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 the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow." Snow also closes the book, washing away the narrator's tears.

A snowflake is how Ka arranged his poems after reading a description in an encyclopedia that "each crystal snowflake forms its own unique hexagon. Since ancient times, mankind has been awed and mystified by the secrets of snow." Ka's awakening to God comes because of the snow falling and he later compares that each person has its own unique snowflake that resembles who they are.

From the start, Ka is also there to win the affections of Ipek -- "On the way to the newspaper office, his heart revealed a thing or two that his mind refused to accept: First in returning to Istanbul from Frankfurt for the first time in twelve years, Ka's purpose was not simply to attend to his mother's funeral but also to find a Turkish girl to make his wife; second it was because he secretly hoped that this girl might be Ipek that he had traveled all the way from Istanbul to Kars."

From then on, Ka works to gain the affection of Ipek, but always has the premonition that his happiness with Ipek is only meant to be doomed. The other characters of the novel are only supporting characters to those two but just like in Romeo and Juliette, the supporting characters are the ones that change the outcome. There's the actor-army leader, the militant Islamist leader, the independent woman, the religious school youth, the newspaperman, Ipek's family, etc, who all influence how the story ends. The narrator gives peeks into the tragedy by outlining the end of Ka's life alone in Frankfurt leaving the reader to only forge on to discover what could have made it impossible for Ipek to return to Frankfurt with Ka. 

The characters in the novel are also always concerned at how they are going to be perceived by Westerners especially those in Europe. One character at the end tells the narrator to make sure that his readers not believe anything he says about them. "No one can understand us from so far away."

Next month: Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick and Palestine by Joe Sacco