...an engrossing feat of tale-spinning … Although it's set in the 1990's and was begun before Sept. 11, Snow is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts … In Snow, translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine … The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile — these are vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape.
For all the density of its real-world detail Snow is really a book about a quest, and a miracle that grows out of it. Ka’s quest is not inspired by politics, and the mystery it engenders belongs to an entirely different category altogether … Where Pamuk really excels in this novel is in the deftness with which he allows these forces to tug at one another. Like Dostoevsky, the literary forebear whose spirit haunts this book most palpably, Pamuk appears to value politics, among other things, as a great opportunity to let his characters rant in all sorts of productive ways … As we find ourselves retracing Ka’s steps, in more or less reverse order, we realize that we are in a palindrome, a crystalline mirroring. The symmetry may be only half-hidden, but it is all the more singular for that. We may not know what axis of the snowflake we now find ourselves on.
It is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor and more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author's same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost. All this finds voices through characters whose tactile immediacy fades imperceptibly into a fog of ambiguousness and contradiction … In his picaresque wanderings through the streets, symbolically blurred and isolated under a weeklong blizzard, [Ka] goes from one encounter to the next. Some are sinister, some alluring, some surreal … For Mr. Pamuk beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors begotten by human passions and obstinate memory. Neither do the horrors diminish it.
Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players … The poems that Ka writes in Kars turn out to be governed by a ‘deep and mysterious underlying structure’ similar to that of a snowflake, and the same is true of the novel itself. The deeper you read, the more the symmetries multiply. Nearly every character has a double, down to the narrator himself, who is eventually revealed to be a novelist friend of Ka's named Orhan, telling Ka's story after his death based on information gleaned from his notebooks. All these mirror images add up to create a dizzying effect, which is deepened by the snow that begins to fall on the first page of the novel and does not let up until nearly the end.
The snow that falls steadily throughout the book has a magical effect on Kars, concealing the evidence of poverty and decay, highlighting the beauty of the old Russian and Armenian buildings, making everyone feel closer together and giving Ka a powerful sense of the presence — and the silence — of God. During the next three days, Ka has a staggering series of life-changing experiences … The novel vividly portrays the cruelty and intolerance of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the representatives of the secularist Turkish state. More important, however, Pamuk has created believable, sympathetic characters representing both sides and has given an eloquent voice to their anger and frustration. These are no monsters but ordinary human beings who actually have much more in common than they would wish to acknowledge.
If you want a story that plays your heartstrings like a lute, read up to page 120, then give the book to someone who deserves some serious bedevilment. Pamuk ignores that sacred rule Americans have that you protect the hero's honor. Ka plays whining mind games with fundamentalists. Ka acts like a selfish little boy toward Ipek. Ka gets innocent people killed … Snow is, quite simply, a crash course in the conflicts of the non-Arab Islamic world … Pamuk has written a book to make readers uncomfortable on both sides of the Bosphorus. Snow, despite its flaws, is an excellent work.
The book is full of winning characters, from Ka himself to Blue, a handsome Islamist terrorist with the gift of the gab, an actor-manager and his wife who tour small Anatolian towns staging revolutionary plays and coups de main, and Serdar Bey, the local newspaper editor, who has a habit of writing up events and running them off his ancient presses before they occur … Yet there are literary judgments that some readers will question. The first is to omit Ka's poems. The green book has been lost or stolen and what remain are Ka's notes on how he came to write his 19 poems in Kars and how they might be arranged on the crystalline model of a snowflake. That is quite as dull as it sounds.
The comedy of public events, where protest and proclamation rapidly age into melodramatic cliché, overlays certain tragic realities of contemporary Turkey … Ka has a drifting, ghostly presence that becomes exasperatingly mired in the role of negotiator, schemer, man of action; it wasn’t clear, at least to this reader, what his decisive action, for which he suffers in the end, was. Nor is his love for Ipek, beautiful and wise as she is conjured to be, very involving … If at times Snow seems attenuated and opaque, we should not forget that in Turkey, insofar as it partakes of the Islamic world’s present murderous war of censorious fanaticism versus free speech and truth-seeking, to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage.
This richly detailed tale is in effect a dialectic made flesh by a thrilling plot ingeniously shaped to climax with the aforementioned theatrical production and to coincide with the narrator’s revelations of Ka’s last hours in Kars, which ironically consummate the flurry of poetic creativity released in him by his experiences there. The novel’s meanings inhere memorably in the controlling title metaphor, which signifies cleansing, silence, sleep, obliteration, ‘the beauty and mystery of creation,’ and the organizing principles for Ka’s late poems.
