When I picked up a copy of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, ‘Snow’, at my library, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew Pamuk was a writer of some acclaim – he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2006 – and also that his works usually centered around the socio-political situation of his native Turkey. The back-cover pitch for the book had this to say: ‘Orhan Pamuk’s magnificent and bestselling new novel evokes the spiritual fragility of the non-Western world, its ambivalence about the godless West, and its fury.’
I guess I had been hoping the novel would be similar to Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’, a tale of fiction primarily, but in which the country (Afghanistan) and its customs are of equal significance. But ‘Snow’ seems to suffer the same sort of identity crisis that seems to plague the ordinary citizens of Turkey – told in first-person style in patches, one could almost mistake it for a memoir, if the other characters that populate the book, as well as the events described in it, hadn’t been so outrageously surreal.
The book revolves around Ka (short for ‘Kerim Alakuşoğlu), a poet and a political exile, who heads to the town of Kars on the Turkish border to report on the local elections and on a spate of recent suicides among Kars’ young women, for a large Istanbul paper. The real motive for his trip, is personal of course – he hopes to find and marry İpek, the object of his affection since his college days. Add to the plot Kadife – İpek’s sister, Blue – an Islamist outlaw and Sunay Zaim, a stage actor who suffers from delusions of political grandeur, and what you get, unfortunately, is a set of watered-down characters, who get on your nerves and make you want to scream in frustration. So, while a blizzard cuts Kars off from the rest of Turkey, Ka uses the opportunity to woo İpek. Sunay, meanwhile, stages a political play, and in the midst of this play, declares a coup over the city, with his henchmen (erstwhile ‘actors’ on the stage) firing live rounds of gunfire into the audience. Here is when it starts to irritate. It is very, very hard to believe that an entire city sits gaping at the stage like morons, while the lead actor grandly declares a coup. Pamuk’s description of Ka is also a shoddy affair – instead of drawing a clear picture of the man, he sticks to the worst tactic of all, imbuing him with a mysterious, dark personality – we are asked to believe that the character has a depth of personality that defies our ability to understand him, thus conveniently absolving Pamuk of the responsibility to inform readers just why his protagonist is such a spineless, shallow creature. I hate it when authors resort to such tricks. Instead of a well thought-out protagonist, all we get is a shadow figure, someone obsessed with his poems and his love life. In another incarnation, Ka, if he had been a flesh-and-blood creature, could very well have been the Nero that fiddled while Rome burned. İpek’s role in the book is as undefined and soul-less as that of an actress in a Bollywood flick. She’s a mere prop – for the protagonist to salivate over. Every other character (Blue, Kadife, İpek’s ex-husband Muhtar, the boy from the religious school, Necip) could have been done away with.
To be fair, the novel raises pertinent, modern-day issues, which I found very relevant even in the Indian context. Is a State really secular when it suppresses all religious expression to the point that ordinary people who are trying to live by the tenets of their religion are viewed as fundamentalists? In the novel, a bunch of young girls seek to wear the headscarf as a sign of their religion (Islam), but the State, in its secular spirit, sees it as a sign of political Islam, and tries to force these girls to bare their heads (the more resistant of these girls commit suicide to escape from the dilemma, and yet, suicide is banned by Islam). You hope that the novel would provide some light into the thought process of these girls: in a bid to prove their loyalty to their religion, the girls take a step that is condemned by that very religion. The author does try to explore this a bit, but he returns, unfortunately, to the depravity of his own pathetic hero.
The novel also brings to light the resentment against the West – ordinary citizens in the villages of Turkey, the author would have you believe, view the West as Godless – a place of infinite evil. They assume that Westerners have a condescending attitude towards their problems and their religious beliefs. Every sign of assertion of religious identity seems a deliberate attempt to cock a snook at the West and its intolerance. My thoughts on this subject deserve a whole separate blog post J
The novel, in hindsight, was one that had tremendous potential, but it never delivered to expectations. I think Pamuk would have done better to brand it as ‘non-fiction’, doing away with the characters and sticking to the fascinating description of the Turkish people. Would I recommend ‘Snow’ to fellow-readers? Probably not.
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
