Berger on
Books
Orhan Pamuk,
Snow (translated by Maureen Freely)
Reviewed by Tom Berger
On
the final page of Orhan Pamuk's Snow,
a character tells the narrator, a novelist named Orhan, "I'd
like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about
me, anything you say about any of us." These touches, the apparent
lack of distinction between novelist and narrator and the calling
of attention to the novel as a story not to be believed, will not
seem remarkable to readers of Pamuk's novels, which include elements
of postmodernism and magic realism. The title of his previous novel,
My
Name Is Red, comes from a chapter narrated by that color
as used in manuscript illuminations, and the book also includes
chapters narrated by a corpse and a dog. Pamuk questions the nature
of the novel and storytelling throughout his novels; another central
preoccupation is the nature of identity, and he is fond of doubled
characters whose identities are so intertwined as to seem uncertain,
like the Italian slave and his Muslim master in The
White Castle or the journalist uncle and nephew in The
Black Book.
But the new novel, unlike Pamuk's
previous works, deals directly with current events in Turkey, and
part of the interest for the Western reader is the insight into
the conflict between the West and fundamentalist Islam that is one
of the primary themes. Snow is the story of Orhan's attempt
to understand the fate of his friend, the poet Ka, an atheist political
exile from Istanbul who has been living for years in Frankfurt.
In Kars, a town in northeastern Turkey, Ka attempts to understand
what has driven several devout young Muslim women to suicide and
what drives a former friend from Istanbul and young students he
has just met to a fundamentalist Islam that he finds baffling. One
possible answer is shouted by a young Kurd, "We're not stupid, we're
just poor!" Echoing this idea, Pamuk himself noted, in an interview
in The Guardian (9/29/2001), that what drives many to support
the Taliban or to condone the attacks on America is not Islam, but
a clear sense of the difference in living standards between western
Europe/America and the rest of the world and "the feeling of impotence
deriving from degradation and the failure to be heard and understood."
Snow should be read both
for its political content and for Pamuk's masterful storytelling.
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Tom Berger shines the light
of literature on college students in Washington, DC.