Ka in Kars

I'm late coming to Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which I've been reading over the last two weeks. The reviews say it better than I could, but I was struck by one of Pamuk's more playful notes: at the end of Snow, a brief appendix sets out 'The order in which Ka wrote his poems', indexed by name ('Snow', 'All Humanity and the Stars', 'The Place Where the World Ends', etc), chapter and page number. The poems are never actually shared with the reader; you're left to imagine them for yourself. Pamuk may have been wise to do this: the most jarring section in Jane Eyre included descriptions of her paintings. It was all deeply symbolic, and many learned essays have been written on the subject, but I knew instantly that I never wanted to see the cormorant, the Evening Star and the kingly head hanging on my walls. Sometimes less is more.

The reviews:

Tom Payne in The Telegraph:
"In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?
The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women.
Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. 'Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?' an Islamist asks Kars's director of education, before shooting him. 'Does she want to become a film star?' The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives."

Maureen Freely, who translated the book, has also reviewed it:
"...[It] also sets out to confound and offend in a way that is as reckless as it is heroically even-handed. Although the military return to restore order at the end of the show, no Kemalist will be proud of Osman Nuri Çolak, the officer who lets the coup happen. No one in Ankara will be pleased by the accounts of torture at the hands of the police or the team led by Z Demirkol. Westernised readers will be offended by the space Pamuk gives to Islamist characters and ideas. Islamists will be offended by his less than respectful portrayal of Islamist leaders. None of these parties is likely to find comfort in the fact that those who come out worst in this story are the left-wing bourgeois intellectuals who are just passing through."

Margaret Atwood in the NYT: "A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would."

John Updike reviews it for The New Yorker:
"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. Pamuk, relatively young as he is, at the age of fifty-two, qualifies as that country’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the near-assassination of Islam’s last winner must cross his mind."