Pamuk's Snow

About Snow

Snow (Kar, 2002) is Orhan Pamuk's most overtly political novel — a portrait of Ka, a Turkish poet in exile in Frankfurt who travels to the snowbound northeastern city of Kars to investigate the suicides of young women forbidden to wear headscarves in school, and finds the full spectrum of Turkish political tensions (Islamists, secularists, Kurdish nationalists, the military) locked in conflict while snow cuts the city off from the rest of the country. Pamuk uses Kars as a microcosm for Turkey's central struggle between Westernization and Islamic identity, between the Kemalist secular state and the religious conservatism that challenged it. Snow was published as Turkey was beginning EU accession negotiations and captured the political moment with extraordinary precision. Pamuk himself was subsequently prosecuted under Article 301 for 'insulting Turkishness' in a newspaper interview; the charges were eventually dropped after international pressure, and he won the Nobel Prize in 2006, the year after.