BOOK
REVIEW In defense of Turkish
cigarettes Snow by Orhan
Pamuk
Reviewed by Spengler
"Like
mist rising from cracked asphalt, smoke swirls slowly in
a mute vortex from the shallowness of the ashtray's
bowl, like the silent deadfall of snow, except that it
floats up rather than down ..." I do not remember now
whether this passage actually appears in Orhan Pamuk's
latest novel, Snow, but if it does not, there
are hundreds that sound just like it in Maureen Freely's
translation. It is late at night, and I have lit another
Turkish Special, crimping in its oval shape just enough
to ease the draft, but not too much, or the outpouring
of its incense would overwhelm the senses. Turkish
cigarettes, like Turkish coffee and raki, define Turkish
culture as much as English culture is defined by
"Wensleydale cheese, boiled
cabbage cut into sections,
beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and
the music of Elgar", in T S Eliot's enumeration (see What is American culture?,
November 18, 2003).
Marlboro Reds, however, are
Orhan Pamuk's cigarette of choice, an intimation that
Turkey's most celebrated chronicler always will stand
outside the window of the Turkish soul looking in. The
book has only one hero, an Islamist radical identified
as "Blue", who sadly praises Marlboro Reds as America's
one real gift to the world. Preferring Marlboros to
Turkish tobacco is as bad as choosing McDonald's over
meze (traditional Turkish appetizers).
None of this would merit the attention of Asia
Times Online readers except that Turkey has taken Orhan
Pamuk as its reigning bard to the point that US
President George W Bush hailed Pamuk as a bridge between
East and West during his recent visit to Turkey. Pamuk
threw contempt on Bush's praise in an August 15
interview with Alexander Star in the New York Times:
Star: When George Bush was in
Istanbul recently for the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] summit, he referred to you as a "great
writer" who has helped bridge the divide between East
and West. Citing your own statements about how people
around the world are very much alike, he defended
American efforts to help people in the Middle East
enjoy their "birthright of freedom". Did you think he
understood what you meant?
Pamuk: I
think George Bush put a lot of distance between East
and West with this war. He made the whole Islamic
community unnecessarily angry with the United States,
and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to
lots of horrors and inflict cruel and unnecessary pain
to lots of people. It will raise the tension between
East and West. These are things I never hoped would
happen. In my books I always looked for a sort of
harmony between the so-called East and West. In short,
what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and
used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And
what had been done was a cruel thing.
Turkey, I have argued in the past (Careful what you Bush for,
August 3), once again is the sick man of Europe, and its
loss of grip frees the dogs of a new Great War. Those in
the West who still view Turkey as a pillar of Western
influence in a troubled region should read Snow
sitting down. At length, American policy analysts have
sounded the alarm over Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's
perceived Islamist agenda, eg Michael Rubin in National
Review Online on August 10. Pamuk portrays a Turkey
whose center cannot hold because it has rotted away.
Suicide is the recurring theme of Pamuk's new
novel. Franz Kafka's "K" provides the archetype for his
protagonist, the poet "Ka", with characters and
situations borrowed explicitly from The Trial and
The Castle, down to the setting in a snowbound
provincial town. But the town in this case is Kars,
where Armenians outnumbered Turks 14-1 at the outbreak
of World War I. After the extermination or exile of the
local Armenian population, their monuments and churches
remain as a ghastly admonition to the impoverished and
largely idle Turkish inhabitants. The Turks of Kars live
on foreign ground, buffeted by the Westernizing ideas of
Kemal Ataturk and the Arabic ideas of the Koran.
Ultimately they have nothing of their own, and dwell on
the idea of suicide.
Ka is there to look up an
old girlfriend, but as a pretext secures an assignment
to report on an epidemic of suicides among young women.
Female suicide is widespread in the Islamic world; such
an epidemic occurred in Turkey during the early 1990s,
and another one claimed the lives of several dozen young
women in the Afghan city of Herat during 2002.
Not only the women want to die. Another
character explains, "You see hundreds of these jobless,
luckless, hopeless, motionless poor creatures in every
town ... They've forgotten how to keep themselves tidy,
they've lost the will to button up their stained jackets
... their powers of concentration are so weak they can't
follow a story to its conclusion ... they watched TV not
because they liked or enjoyed the programs but because
they couldn't bear to hear about their fellows'
depression, and television helped to show them out; what
they really wanted was to die, but they didn't think
themselves worthy of suicide," that is, unlike their
women.
Not only the unemployed but the
intelligentsia hover at the edge of a suicide's grave.
Ka's love interest divorced her husband who embraced
Islam after attempting to freeze himself to death in the
street. The young seminarians who puppy-like approach Ka
cannot understand why he, an atheist, wants to live: "If
a person knows and loves God, he never doubts God's
existence," one of them says to Ka. "It seems to me
you're not giving me an answer because you're too timid
to admit that you're an atheist. But we knew this
already ... Do you suffer the same pangs as the poor
atheist in the story? Do you want to kill yourself?"
Pamuk's plot appears as slender embroidery
around this abysmal background. By attempting to
understand both the Islamist opposition and the
repressive military, Ka unwillingly becomes a double
agent. He wins the girl, who as it turns out was the
mistress of the Islamist Marlboro Man "Blue", and then
loses the girl when his duplicity comes to light. The
local military stages a bloody coup in order to prevent
an Islamist victory in forthcoming elections. The
confrontation between the secularist military and the
Islamists plays out in a grotesque piece of public
theater. Ka, who has written nothing for years, writes a
series of inspired poems, none of which Pamuk chooses to
share with his readers. Ka returns to Frankfurt and
eventually is shot down in the street by one or another
of the sides he offended during his visit to Kars.
Absence of actual poetry in a novel whose
apparent subject is the reawakening of the national muse
under crisis cannot be dismissed as mere post-modern
irony. Like the city of Kars itself, the novel
Snow leaves one with the impression that there is
no there there; it is the Kafka-like meandering of
characters trapped in a malign labyrinth with no way out
but self-destruction. If Pamuk's metaphor for modern
Turkey holds true, Iraq will not be the greatest of its
worries during the next several years.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Faber and Faber Ltd,
August 2004. ISBN: 057121830X. Price: 17 pounds
(US$31.85), 448 pages.
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cabbage cut into sections,
beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and
the music of Elgar", in T S Eliot's enumeration (see 
