With Snow, Orhan Pamuk walks a fine line between reality and fiction. With a novelist's astuteness, he presents some of the dire political and social realities of Turkey, illuminating the underlying themes of the domestic threats to the state edifice in Turkey, namely, Islam and Kurdish nationalism. The story comprises a three-day trip by protagonist Ka, a political exile, to and from the northeastern city of Kars. The book takes its title from a prominent feature that Kars—or the region it belongs to—is associated with: snow. Kars is one of the cities in the eastern part of Turkey notorious for a series of challenges it presents to its dwellers, from excruciating cold to austere poverty. Pamuk presents the city as a microcosm of the greater Turkish society. It is divided among three clashing communities: secularists, Islamists, and Kurdish separatists. [End Page 163] Pamuk depicts the tension between the secularists and the Islamists, probing into the mindsets of each group.

A poet in exile in Germany, Ka returns to Turkey after twelve years to attend his mother's funeral and "to find a Turkish girl to make his wife." He continues on to Kars in order to report about the "suicide girls" for the Republic newspaper. His surreptitious goal, though, is to see Ipek, love of his life, again hoping that she might be the wife he has been looking for.

Through Ka's reporting and his personal journey, Pamuk addresses the plight of one of the most ostracized groups in Turkish society, namely, girls with headscarves who strive to survive despite a ban on headscarves. Albeit that he has adumbrated the subject at the outset, the author does not focus as much on the Kurdish separatists as he does on the Islamists, the girls with headscarves, and what I would dub "secular fundamentalists" and their interactions with one another. On the verge of a municipal election, in which a member of the so-called Prosperity Party (according to the author, the Islamist Party) is leading, Ka looks into the underlying reasons for the suicides among the young girls who resist taking their headscarves off.

Turkey and France are the only countries that have laicism-secularism set forth in their constitutions. In the Turkish context, secularism is not confined to the separation between religion and the state. Laicism-secularism in Turkey is a means of state hegemony and control over religion and freedom of expression. Invariably, this unique and parochial interpretation of secularism is justified as a form of what the Turks refer to as Kemalism. Pamuk does not refer to Kemalist ideology overtly, but nonetheless he delineates its traits in his characters. Kemalism requires adherence to the personality and values of the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, and created of him an idolatrous figure to be almost worshipped.

Snow, in a savvy manner, brings this staunch secularism to life in the characters of Sunay Zaim—a playwright—and his wife, Funda Eser, a dancer and actress. Ka represents the "confused" face of the Turkish person, a "modern" man from a privileged family in Istanbul, raised with the "inculcated" values of the laicized republic, "whose intellect belongs to Europe, whose heart belongs to the religious high-school militants, and whose head is mixed up." Although Ka, due to his lifestyle, can be seen as one of the secularist-Kemalists, as a man of political exile he is a "victim" of the staunchly secularist ideology that is not comfortable with freedom of expression, which is why Ka has been in exile. He is a man in search of his own soul. At the same time, Ka is striving to discern where the secularists, the Islamists, and in particular Muslim girls with headscarves are coming from. The Islamists' perspective in Snow is represented by Necip—a youngster who studies at the state-regulated religious school—and by Blue, a fugitive in hiding. Necip is a naive religious boy with a lot of curiosity about atheism and bile against the secularist ideology, while Blue is an intransigent Muslim extremist [End Page 164] who defies the regime. The most prominent character in the novel, besides Ka, is Kadife—sister of Ka's beloved Ipek—a girl with the headscarf. Kadife, a former secularist, is the leading figure among the girls with headscarves.

The most ostentatious manifestation of Turkey's intransigent secularist ideology is the ban on the wearing of these headscarves. Enacted by the military government after the coup d'état of 1980, the ban bars women with headscarves from taking an active role in society. It bars them from entering educational premises; seeking higher education; becoming bar-certified lawyers; teaching in elementary or higher education; serving as academicians; attending privately owned computer literacy, sewing, or other classes; and even at times seeking medical care. (In an incident in 2003, a woman named Medine Bircan was not admitted to an emergency room because her identification card pictured her with a headscarf, although ultimately she was attended to.)

Kadife is a strong-headed young woman fraught with self-confidence who turns toward religion and starts wearing a headscarf in her late adolescence. She represents the growing number of young women with headscarves in Turkey today who demand, unlike most of their parents, the best of both modern and traditional worlds. These girls come mostly from the lower strata of society both in terms of economics and education. Despite the lack of education of their parents, they demand to be highly educated and to assume respectable positions in society as professional women, yet concomitantly, they want to be more religious. The moment women demand to be religious, a tension arises within the Turkish state. For the state, as part of its modernization efforts, has engineered a particular Turkish woman type who is to be educated, achieve progress, fully participate in the system, and not be too religious. Hence, with the demand to wear headscarves, women acknowledge the failure of the state's attempt to define them. In order to dissuade women from wearing headscarves, the state imposes a ban, coercing them to become someone else. The message of the ban is clear: You can enjoy your civil and human rights and liberties only so long as you appear secular, without headscarf. Otherwise you are to be uneducated and confined to the household. Being an utter outcast at the social and political level for such a woman is the ineluctable byproduct. The ban, thus, in a way, is the repercussion of defiance. Kadife, in this context, feels the wrath of the recalcitrant state, which is epitomized in Sunay Zaim and his wife.

Snow alludes to the reprehensible reality that comes with the ban—the ensuing psychological burden. Girls, at the burgeoning years of their lives, are caught between a unmoving state and their personal values. Most of the time, the lives of girls become more complicated when their families intervene on one side or the other. The families may coerce them to take their headscarves off so as to move on with their education and their lives, or seeing there is no other way out, may push them into forced marriages so that they can at least become "wife persons." Not capable of getting out of the quandary [End Page 165] they are in, some girls collapse psychologically and cave in, not to the state, but to their inner weaknesses and resort to suicide, an absolutely prohibited action in Islam.

At the outset, Snow, albeit subliminally, insinuates the precarious relationship between the "deep state" and the fulcrum of the state ideology in the character of Serdar Bey—owner of the Border City Gazette. When Ka confronts him with the news he will publish in the next day's newspaper, concerning Ka's nonexistent, unwritten poem called "Snow," Serdar Bey unperturbedly responds that "quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first."

The author sets forth his key argument in the second half of the book: "How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?"

Pamuk adeptly converges the sufferings of the underdogs of Turkish society, Muslim girls with headscarves, an atheist political exile, and the Islamists from a religious high school, raising the question of "long lost hopes, lives and dreams in the name of securing, what?" Snow is poised on the enigmatic line between fiction and reality. It is riveting, incendiary, and thought provoking.

Merve Kavakci