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Book Review: Ethereal Yet Rooted In Reality

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  • Book Review: Ethereal Yet Rooted In Reality

    ETHEREAL YET ROOTED IN REALITY
    Review By Anu Nathan

    Malaysia Star, Malaysia
    April 9 2006

    SNOW
    By: Orhan Pamuk
    Publisher: Vintage, 426 pages
    (ISBN: 0-3775-70686-0)

    THIS is the longest it has taken me to read a book and review - almost
    six months. I had to keep putting it down because Snow is not easily
    digested. Pamuk is more than a novelist; he is a reporter first and
    foremost, and this political novel charts the tumult within modern-day
    Turkey. Every time I put down the book because it was threatening
    to overwhelm me, I was forced to pick it up again, not just because
    Pamuk's name and face jumped out of newspapers and magazines, but
    because I was compelled to read on till the end.

    Cliched as it may sound, Pamuk is no stranger to controversy.

    Recently, Turkish authorities had charged him with "insulting
    Turkishness" for talking about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the
    massacre of 30,000 Kurds in Anatolia. Much earlier, in 1995, he was
    among a group of authors tried for writing essays that criticised
    Turkey's treatment of the Kurdish minority.

    Until I visited Turkey last year, I had no idea who Pamuk was, despite
    the fact that he is a prolific writer and has been a regular in the
    Bosphorus literary scene since the late 1970s. I was strolling in the
    Beyoglu district and ventured into a bookstore, hoping to pick up a
    book by a Turkish writer. The bookstore owner/manager recommended
    Pamuk, who by then had achieved international fame with his book
    My Name is Red (about a murderous Ottoman miniaturist), which could
    almost be a parallel novel to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

    Two days after coming home, I found Snow on the review shelf. The
    next week a colleague passed me My Name is Red, which only succeeded
    in derailing the review of Snow. It seemed there was no escaping Pamuk.

    As a novelist Pamuk belongs to that special breed of crossover authors
    who manage to sell and achieve critical acclaim - think Gabriel Garcia
    Marquez, Milan Kundera, Paulo Coelho.

    Snow (Kar in Turkish) is a highly-charged political novel that
    explores the conflict between Islamism and Westernisation in modern
    Turkey and tackles head-on the delicate headscarf issue.

    In Kars (the poetic transition of Ka to Kar to Kars is almost a
    sublime touch, like the snowflake which the poet clings to), heavy
    snow cuts off the Anatolian town from the rest of Turkey just after a
    poet called Ka arrives, a pointed reference to the desolate remoteness
    of Kars in vivid contrast to forward-looking Istanbul.

    Ka, who has for years been living in Frankfurt, futilely trying to
    create poetry amid odd jobs to sustain his departure from Turkey, has
    been assigned by an Istanbul newspaper to investigate a chain of young
    girls committing suicide because, as the local police chief explains,
    "they were not allowed to wear headscarves in school."

    Tracing almost lovingly from Dostoevsky (even Kafka comes to mind),
    the characters in Snow are all flawed, with some juggling dual
    identities. Among them are the Islamist who has no qualms about
    keeping a mistress, a former Istanbul socialite who champions the
    headscarf cause with idealistic zeal, and the Communist democrat.

    Most ruptured is Ka who, in Malaysian parlance would best be described
    as a lalang, swaying in whichever direction the wind blows, unsure
    of his convictions.

    Ka, as we soon find out, is not in Kars to uncover the mystery of the
    virgin suicides, but to woo his elusive classmate Ipek, now happily
    divorced. Ipek is the only cause he fervently pursues, even as a
    flood of poetic inspiration turns on the creative switch which this
    washed-out poet had considered dead.

    Ka's footsteps in Kars, Istanbul and Frankfurt are later retraced
    by his novelist friend Orhan (Pamuk also includes himself in My
    Name is Red), who is determined to detail Ka's life, understand the
    overpowering love he had for Ipek amid troubled times, and his final
    days before succumbing to a hail of bullets.

    In this didactic treatise, displacement, blind devotion, love and
    alienation all jostle to take prime place against a backdrop of the
    fleeting, ethereal promise of peace and unity amid differences.

    Pamuk is an inveterate storyteller and here, he has woven a magical
    tale, sometimes superfluous, but always engaging, about ordinary
    Turks affected by decisions beyond their control and how Turkey,
    being both blue-eyed blonde and swarthy tries to strike a balance
    between Islamism and secularism/modernism.
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