ABSTRACT

Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2002) in the village of Kars in the eastern Anatolia province of Turkey, far away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. The protagonist Ka, a poet posing as a journalist, is caught between the factions of political Islamists and militant nationalists. His dilemma forecasts Pamuk’s own arrest and trial in Istanbul in 2005 on charges of “insulting Turkishness” for suggesting that responsibility for the Armenian genocide in Anatolia in 1915 lies with the Turkish Republic. The novel’s diegetic narrator “Orhan Bey” finds the “hidden symmetry” of a snowflake design that organizes Ka’s book of poems, Snow, on three axes of Reason, Imagination, and Memory, though the poems themselves are lost. Orhan Bey’s novel is likewise organized according to a hexagonal design whose three axes are traversed by pairings of the Veiled/Unveiled, Politics/Beauty, and Belief/Incredulity. Pamuk’s Snow negotiates the local conflicts between conservative Islamists and secular republicans, but as a global novel that defends freedom of expression it fulfills his conviction that cosmopolitan citizens “do their deepest thinking about themselves” by reading literature.