Several years later Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Turkish writer to do so. Pamuk then adds special depth by slowly revealing that a Turkish novelist named Orham Pamuk is writing this story after the events and lets us into the back rooms of the story as initially revealed. And with all this the very human story of longing and suffering and joy grabs us and holds us fast. It helps us as Westerners to understand the special place that Turkey occupies in the European/Eastern divide. Pamuk handles his story with a light hand (Ok: occasionally not so light) and has fun with both sides of a feud that is uniquely Turkish and yet universal. Ka is able to write poems for the first time in years. Secular characters spar with fierce religionists. Alliances are built, questioned, destroyed. Everyone knows that the coup will be smashed when the storm stops but everyone still behaves as if this political theater were real. There is a ridiculous but deadly coup at the National Theater staged by the primo actor and secular loyalist. Ka seems successful in his pursuit, but his lingering melancholy and his doubts about his own atheism lead him into very strange territory in this very isolated city. He comes to woo the beautiful Ipek and to investigate the suicides of a number of young girls who refused to remove their head scarves as determined by the central and secular government in Ankara.

The poet who insists on being known only as Ka, returns to Kars after twelve years of political exile in Germany. Now a backwater, the city was once a gleaming and cosmopolitan center. The story takes place over four or five days during a snowstorm in the city of Kars.

It does so also with satire and wit, foolish and wise conversation, and great insight for both Turks and Westerners into the Turkish bifurcated political reality. Not a small menu but for Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, this 2002 work accomplishes most of what it sets out to do. The novel Snow tells a long and involved story of exploration and return from exile, of longing and happiness and the realization of their impossibility, of the role of God in the modern world. Exploring the many meanings of frozen sky water

Snow turkish novel