"One of the pleasures of writing this novel, was to say to my Turkish readers and to my international audience, openly and a bit provocatively, but honestly, that what they call a terrorist is first of all a human being. Our secularists, who are always relying on the army and who are destroying Turkey's democracy, hated this book because here you have a deliberate attempt by a person who was never religious in his life to understand why someone ends up being what we or the Western world calls an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist." - Orhan PamukUnderstanding is everything, although it does not immediately change anything.
Ka, a poet from Istanbul, return to Turkey for his mother's funeral after spending 12 years as a political exile in Germany. He then decides to visit a small Turkish town of Kars. His reasons are 1)his curiosity about the suicide epidemic among young girls 2)his love for Ipek - whom he had a crush when he was young.
He arrives in Kars when the snows start to fall which then quickly turn into blizzard, closing all major roads out of Kars. He was asked to report on the impending municipal election as well as to gets into the root of why teenage girls, mostly who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair, are suicidal.
At his first day in Kars, he witnessed an assination of Director of Education, the man who has carried out the government's orders to ban the "headscarf girls" from school. He then comes into contact with Blue, "an infamous Islamist terrorist", a pious student named Necip and Ipek's sister, Kadife, the leader of the head-scarf girls. Afterwards, a military coup at the National Theater begins when soldiers burst in, shoot randomly into the audience, kill a number of people, then round up "dangerous" citizens, including some of the people Ka has encountered earlier. To cut long story short, Ka's life is in danger.
All the while his love and burning passion for Ipek intensified. In one brilliant sequence, he negotiates a statement of unity between the city's Islamist, Kurdish and socialist leaders for the sole purpose of luring Ipek's father out of the hotel where they live, so that he can make love to her. It is also in Kars when he regains his inspiration for the first time in four years, and poems come to him as if dictated by a higher power. Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving.
The title of this book is just absolutely perfect. This novel turn out to be governed by a "deep and mysterious underlying structure" similar to that of a snowflake. 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. Clever twist. All these mirror images might 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.
IMHO, this book does shed some lights of what our world as we know it is becoming. It is as much about Islam as about anything else. To most people nowadays - secularist or whatever they want to call themselves, religion is nothing more than a foreign word. God help them.
Bear in mind this book was published in Turkey and Europe before September 11. After reading it, I feel like the novel has an ominous prescience to it as it seems like life attempting an awkward imitation of his art.
I definitely recommend this book. The only problems with it IMO come from it being a translation but you'll enjoy it nonetheless. It may not be the easiest read, but it's an important one.
Understanding is everything, even when it changes nothing. Perhaps it is all we at times, can do.
