Orhan Pamuk, Snow
The Guardian carried an interview with Orhan Pamuk some days ago. (The above photo, by Eamonn McCabe, appeared in the same paper.) Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Snow, which he began writing two years before 9/11, is set in Kars in north-eastern Turkey and tackles the urgent issues of secularism and religion in a country which has been torn between the two for most of the last century. It is full of intimations of trouble, of arguments that might be unwise for the author to broach in an interview, say, but which his characters can discuss at length. “Can the west endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?” asks one; another comments that “the world has lost patience with repressive regimes”. Pamuk begins Snow with the famous Stendhal quote: “Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.” The irony is that the rest of his fiction is also political, if far more obliquely so; it has set up, within its characters, opposing ideological poles, then patiently probed what Pamuk calls “the confusion in between”.
I’ve just finished teaching Snow in one of my classes, and was surprised to learn that it was started much before the new, yet old, period we call post-9/11, and whose problems find such a refined echo in the novel’s pages. The book doesn’t hesitate to voice doubt about nearly every side that is caught in the debate around religion, fundamentalism, the state, nationalism, and poverty. In fact, the dynamism of such radical doubt, which you can also call a deep empathy for all antagonists, is the novel’s hallmark. My favorite part is perhaps a section that appears very close to the end. The narrator, a novelist called Orhan, has been talking to a young man in the provincial town Kars; the visiting writer is proposing to write a book set in Kars and he asks the young man to tell him what he would say to the future readers of such a book. The young man replies:
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 us. No one can understand us from so far away.
Pamuk once said in an interview with Der Spiegel that he now considers Snow a ‘historical novel’, and I think he was being quite serious. As a Turkey ’specialist’ (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean), I’ve found it very interesting how the novel has been read out of context by (esp. in Europe) as somehow being a topical commentary on certain current dilemmas, particularly Turkey’s suitability for EU membership. While the book’s themes are certainly relevent (almost prescient) both to Turkey & the post-9/11 world in general, the central historical event for Snow isn’t 9/11, it’s the 1997 ’soft coup’ in Turkey, in which the military forced the Islamist Welfare Party out of power, and more generally the situation there in the mid-1990s, with the Kurdish conflict still strong and the political outcome of the rise of religious parties still much more unclear. With Snow, I think Pamuk actually intended (and has said as much) to write an explicitly political novel about the predicament of Turkish society, whereas My Name Is Red was much more a grand attempt to tackle broad themes of Islam and the West, etc. But in retrospect Snow takes on these broader connotations. The Turkish edition definitely came out not long after 9/11; I saw it all over the place during a visit in early spring 2002.
(the Der Speigel interview, which is a great read, is here, & some lengthier comments of mine on it and related coverage are here)
Comment by elizabeth — April 10, 2006 @ 4:02 pm
Interesting to hear your take on “Snow.” I tried my hand at a reading of the novel here… I got interested in Pamuk’s idea of plays where people actually die — as a kind of deconstructive theater. This is one of those books that a lot of people find hard to get through, but there’s really quite a lot going on…
Comment by Amardeep — April 10, 2006 @ 11:49 pm