Snow

by Orhan Pamuk. Faber, 2004. (Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006)
Cover design by Two Associates. Cover illustrations Webistan/Corbis & Natalie Forbes/Corbis.

Turkish poet Ka has been living in exile in Germany. He travels to the remote city of Kars under the guise of being a journalist investigating the suicides of the ‘headscarf girls’. His hidden reason for the journey is to find Ipek, a beautiful woman he remembers from the 70s when they were involved in left-wing politics. The city is cut off by snow. He becomes entangled in a complex political web, falls in love with Ipek and wanders in the snow writing poems. Reading the book one has the feeling of falling into a strange dream.

Turkey has a secular government and the separation of government and religion is written into its constitution. The wearing of headscarves is against the law. The left-wing socialist politics of the 70s which had made Ka an exile, is no longer relevant to the youth. Radical Islam is the path they take to challenge the oppressive central government. Turkey sits between Europe and the Middle East. Orhan Pamuk explores the tensions this creates in Turkish culture.

In an interview in 2005 Pamuk stated, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." Pamuk was charged under a newly introduced Turkish law for insulting Turkishness. In January 2006 the charges were dropped.

-Ines