Where new writing finds its voice
Review

Snow

Grace Andreacchi

Orhan Pamuk
Faber & Faber, 2005

I love the writing of Orhan Pamuk and I’m not afraid to say so, even if he did win the Nobel Prize. I suppose, by some strange twist in the fabric of fate, somebody of real genius had to win it once, and that somebody is Pamuk. Be that as it may, while his books are now bought in large numbers, I find it hard to believe they’ll ever be read in large numbers – another thing entirely – and they do appear on the remainder tables alongside the -humbler offerings of mere mortals. Just the other day I picked up another copy of Istanbul: Memories and the City for a song, the first having been loved to death like the Velveteen Rabbit.

Snow is the kind of dense, literary novel that reminds you why you wanted to be a writer in the first place. At the same time, it’s the kind of book you bury yourself in, dreaming, eyes wide open, of the snow-filled streets of Kars far off in the remote mountains of Anatolia, of the poet hero’s lonely room in the mysterious Snow Palace Hotel, (this book boasts an abundance of improbable poetical nomenclature – the New Life Pastry Shop, the Beer Hall of Joy...), and of the haunting face of the impossibly beautiful Ipek, dressed for death in her black velvet gown. The plot is slight, shifting, a will o’ the wisp, a deadly game, and it runs backwards as well as forwards, enfolding disaster in loops like video tape. And then there is ‘the place where God does not exist’ – both the symbolic heart of the book, and, in a grand architectural coup, the key to the mystery.

On the surface it’s a narrative about a poet who goes off to find a girl he once loved, using as his cover the intention to write a newspaper report about the epidemic of suicides among the ‘headscarf girls’. But Snow gradually reveals itself to the attentive reader as something infinitely more complex and interesting. Who is the mysterious narrator, who occasionally refers to himself as ‘Pamuk’, and seems au fait with the poet’s innermost thoughts? What is the real nature of the strange goings-on in the municipal theatre? Do things like that really happen, even in places as remote as Kars? Why does the snow never stop falling? 

There are diagrams of snowflakes, which are also diagrams of poems, but the poems themselves do not exist, having vanished along with a small green notebook. And then there is the mythical Hans Hansen, editor of an important German -newspaper, who has given the poet his assignment … except he hasn’t. He’s only a handsome shop assistant, who once sold him an overcoat in Frankfurt, the very overcoat he’s wearing to protect himself from the never-ending snows of Kars. Except he can’t really be that either because, of course, he is – he can only be – ‘the blue-eyed one’, the boy whose Teutonic good looks and brash philistinism crush the heart of the young hero in Thomas Mann’s novella
Tonio Kröger.  

And what about that Snow Palace Hotel? I’ve yet to see a single critic make the obvious connection (though perhaps somebody somewhere has done so). The Snow Palace is the home of the Snow Queen in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the same name, and the boy whom she holds captive in quasi-erotic servitude in her snowy kingdom is named Kay (our poet is known only by the name of ‘Ka’). Kay has been hurt by splinters of ice in his heart, which prevent him seeing anything but the bad in everyone and everything. He is unable to love, and Andersen’s story relates how the innocent Gerda struggles to free him from permanent unhappiness. So Ka, in the Snow Palace Hotel, experiences moments of deep happiness in the arms of the beautiful, innocent Ipek, but the ice in his heart isn’t going to melt all that easily... Ka, like Kay, is critical of everything, unhappy with everything – himself most of all – and envious of other people’s happiness. Enchanted by the beauty of the soft, fat flakes falling ceaselessly from the sky, he is inspired to write his series of metaphysical poems, constructed on a pattern of snowflakes. In Andersen’s tale the boy Kay is disenchanted with everything once that splinter of ice gets into his heart – everything, that is, but snowflakes, which he views through a magnifying lens:

‘Look through this glass, Gerda,’ said he. And every flake seemed larger, and appeared like a magnificent flower, or beautiful star; it was splendid to look at! ‘Look, how clever!’ said Kay. ‘That’s much more interesting than real flowers! They are as exact as possible; there is not a fault in them, if they did not melt!’

Is Pamuk’s novel a book about the tensions in modern Turkey? Is it a book about the mixed heritage of the Turks, their ambivalence towards the West, the rise of Islamism and the making of a terrorist? It’s a book about all those things. But at bottom it’s no more about those things than Anna Karenina is about the need for reform in the Russian Civil Service, and a safety review of Russia’s railways. What is it about then? It is about beauty, pain and poetry; the mystery of life, the failure of love, faith and how we break or keep it; who and what we are or might be, or fail to be; and it is all these things with such elegance and complexity and wit that I want to rush out tomorrow and learn Turkish to miss any of it, were there but world enough and time. Read it – what else can I say?