Snow
Orhan Pamuk
Penguinuk (2005)
Rs. 256
Kars means snow
in Turkish and snow as a motif has various purposes to fulfill. For Ka, each
axis of the hexagonal snowflake symbolized an inspiration that resonated into
poetry and luckily for him Kars was
blanketed with such inspirational snowflakes that constantly fell from the
heavens, like cheerless confetti, as human drama unfolded on earth below.
Snowflakes stood for different sentiment and metaphors throughout the book and
the author must have mentioned its presence in every page.
Orhan Pamuk
Penguinuk (2005)
Rs. 256
Much like Bertolt Brecht’s concept of ‘metafiction’, Snow
begins with the narrator addressing the readers directly thereby establishing
the fact that there will always be an unbridgeable reader-writer-protagonist gap
throughout the length of this book. The reader after being thus cautioned by
the narrator is then gradually encouraged to identify himself with the poet protagonist
Ka and similarly the narrator, who we later come to know is the author Orhan
Pamuk himself, sets an example for the readers by irretrievably merging his own
identity with the protagonist to the extent of drinking what Ka drank, sniffing
the coat and bed sheets Ka came in contact with, reading his personal diary,
visiting the places Ka visited (as if metaphorically following his footsteps),
watching the porn he watched, sleeping in the bed he slept and falling in love
with the woman Ka loved.
The readers towards the middle of the book discover that the
first person narrator is none other than Pamuk and this revelation lends a mock
autobiographical element to his tale and this authorial sanctioning makes the
tale appear even more credible than it perhaps actually is.
Snow cannot be separated from its political agenda and this
raised a question in my mind…is having a strict and well defined political
stand point (apart from dillydallying with postmodernist tendencies) cursory
for winning a Nobel Prize?
From what I could gather, given my limited knowledge about Turkey ,
is the book demonstrates how an inconspicuous city/town called Kars
battles for its identity beyond the limitations of rigid Islamists, beyond the
dictations of power thirsty fascists and beyond the monotonous
“stereotypization” of Europhiles.
The town Kars
and the poet Ka have a common thread which binds them together: just like Kars
is frozen into stagnation because of steady snowfall,l Ka, who has stepped into
Kars for poetic inspiration, is
undergoing writer’s block – or his own mental stagnation. Just as Ka’s presence
makes the snow thaw right from the third day of his visit, Kars ’s
influence clears his mind and allows him to note down nineteen beautiful poems
thereby curing his writer’s block. The relationship between the artist and
nature therefore is very symbiotically symmetrical.
Coming to the structure of this novel, Pamuk seems to have
used various Post Modernist literary techniques such as the Roman a clef, ‘play
within a play’, ‘book within a book’ and stretched it even to a point where it
appears to be a book about how to write a book or more precisely a book about
how a book is written….there is a difference and the difference lies in
activeness and passiveness grammatically speaking since Ka repeatedly mentions
that he did not write poems, rather poems, ‘came’ to him.
Snow is the name of the collection of poems which ‘came’ to
Ka while his stay in Kars and which he subsequently lost; and Snow is the name
of the novel which Pamuk writes where he records how these poems came and went
away from Ka. So it is a book about a book.
The boundary between real life and theatre is lifted during
the enactment of the State sanctioned play where the actors open fire at the
audience and Kadife, the leader of the ‘head scarf girls’ unknowingly shoots
Sunay her co-actor and the future autocrat of Kars. The bullets used in both
the incidents were real. The play spills into real life and all the world
indeed becomes their stage. The fictitious audience in the novel unknowingly
becomes a part of a drama they had not agreed to be a part of, so fiction
further enters fiction.
The next boundary to be dissolved is between the author and
his creation. Pamuk enters his story in person and steps into the shoes of his
protagonist Ka and willfully unites himself with Ka’s persona. Therefore author
enters fiction and blurs the reader’s concepts of real and unreal. Flashback
and flashforward though present are sparingly used, and the deliberate
parallels drawn between Ka and Pamuk, are made obvious right towards the end of
the novel.
Pamuk discusses sensitive issues related to the political
upheavals in Turkey and the sudden outbreak of suicide among Muslim girls but
he never crosses a line, he never stimulates a discussion that might give rise
to a riot, never is his tone demeaning and he is not really pushing his readers
into believe anything that might spur world-wide violence. He even takes the
pain to put a few ‘politically correct’ words (almost forcefully) into the
mouths of his characters before closing the book as a precautionary measure
just to clarify that he meant no harm, his tone is the unmistakable
NO-OFFENCE-WITH-ALL-DUE-RESPECT thereby separating himself from the Rushdie
brigade (maybe wisely so).
Snow is a kind of book which will remain with you for a very
long time and you might often confuse its memories with fragments of your own
half remembered dreams.
