Pamuk's Snow Reading Order

Orhan Pamuk's Snow (2002) is his most overtly political novel — a portrait of Ka, a Turkish poet living in Frankfurt exile, who returns to Turkey and travels to the snowbound northeastern city of Kars to investigate the suicide of young women who have been forbidden to wear headscarves in school. What Ka finds in Kars is a microcosm of Turkey's central political tensions: Islamists, secularists, Kurdish nationalists, and the military, all locked in a struggle over identity and modernity while snow cuts the city off from the rest of the country. The novel is also a meditation on the nature of poetry (Ka receives poems that come to him in moments of vision, which he fears losing), on political violence and its seductiveness, and on the relationship between the artist and the political world. Snow was published at a moment when Turkey was beginning the EU accession process that eventually stalled, and it captured the moment's tensions with extraordinary precision. It is Pamuk's most fully realized portrait of contemporary Turkey and the novel that most directly addresses the questions of religion, secularism, and national identity that have defined Turkish political life since the Republic's founding.