This is how poetry is born in the age of war and terror. At the start of an astonishing sequence, Ka feels “a surge of joy” while standing beside Sunay, the actor-cum-coup leader, on a bridge overlooking darkened Kars in the midst of revolution. Enraptured by his vista of “the beautiful snow-covered city with its empty old mansions,” Ka is also “enjoying this proximity to real power.” As Sunay issues orders via walkie-talkie, Ka notices “the wretched shantytown” across the frozen river, where the poor are easy marks for Islamic radicalization and, therefore, obviously justified targets for Kemalist tanks. He listens to Sunay reflect on his love for Kars and to his clever Hegelian justification for the coup, then witnesses a condensed version of twenty-first-century nationalism at work:



This passage, Pamuk at his best, matches sangfroid intelligence with pointillist imagery; arranging together religion, poverty, and military efficiency, punctuated by an ignorant, cheerful dog barking before a burned-out building and playing with corpses-to-be. It is a visceral imprint of the indiscriminate and senseless butchery found far too widely today. And how does it move Ka, its proximate witness? He follows Sunay back to his headquarters and writes a poem that we never see.

Snow makes for difficult reading because it challenges our expectations of the artist mixed up in the loud, hard world. Here, we want to condemn Ka as a conscienceless aesthete because he blissfully poeticizes alongside a would-be tyrant at work. At other times, we want him to cut through the conflict and chaos by writing poetry that sets an assured cast of heroes, villains, and victims. But Pamuk thwarts our desire for clarity. By emphasizing Ka’s ability to hold manifold and contradictory sympathies in suspended orbit, and then veiling the verse that this inspires him to write, Pamuk prevents both poet and poetry from being subjected to moralizing litmus tests and ideological sniffing. More generally, his characterizations are correlative to Turkey’s prismatic complexity, which, the novel makes clear, results from the raw and unceasing interplay between its Islamic pathologies and westernizing pressures. As a result, neither Ka nor Sunay, nor any of the other major characters, not even the terrorist leader, Blue, is drawn so flat as to be a steady marker of right and wrong, or good and evil, or honour and shame, as each tries to beat the others to claiming a singular and stable identity for Turkey.

Eventually, Snow’s whorl of themes and characters tighten around the issue of whether a central character will remove her head covering at the climax of Sunay’s next patriotic production. Because Ka is so immersed in Kars’ familial, romantic, and political crises, his services are variously demanded. He only wants to take the beautiful Ipek back to Frankfurt with him, but this proves contingent upon his securing a resolution amenable to everyone involved in the wider chaos. As the novel reaches its climax, Pamuk summons a melancholic fatedness that recalls Dostoevsky, and we accordingly sense that Ka’s task, demanded by all sides and frustrated by each, will prove impossible. Ka faces too many passionate and calculating men equipped by both East and West with guns and principles, who exercise power over a variegated population too exhausted by unremitting tumult to do anything other than applaud the last Turk standing.

Religion, politics, art, and the private life bind together in Pamuk with a force that the West can only recall today by reading Dante and Chaucer, which is precisely what makes Snow so immediate and important. But the postmodern sleight-of-hand that closes Snow discourages sterile intercultural insights into Islamic themes and the wider gyre of Turkish culture. As the novel closes, one of the characters addresses Western readers, assaulting what sympathetic relations we may have forged:

“If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I’ve just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.”

This vouchsafing of imaginative uncertainty is precisely what is needed in a world crowded by righteous men outfitted with destructive, absolutist presumptions about each other. While enlivening our curiosity, Pamuk’s books make a difficult virtue out of an unsettling necessity: they leave us grateful to be denied absolute knowledge of those faraway peoples, places, and problems that have become our unexpected intimates through the haphazard ways of near-history.