Genre: Fiction
Have in the Library? Yes!
This is the longest book I’ve read this year—over 400 pages! I’m proud of myself! I always think winter is the time to read big books and now winter is almost over. So I may not read another big book this year, but that’s ok. This was a good one.
Snow is a story about the town of Kars. A poet named Ka (no coincidence that the names are similar, I think), arrives in Kars for what turns out to be a tempestuous three days. He’s there to write about a suicide epidemic sweeping the town. But there’s another motive: he’s in love with the beautiful Ipek. And he hopes to persuade her to come back to Germany with him.
As Ka wanders the city, meeting a cast of characters from police to newspapermen, there’s a coup. Fighting breaks out between factions. I didn’t try to follow the exact intricacies of the players: “headscarf girls,” Islamists, militia, Kurdish rebels, police, and others. I just let the individual characters speak and act and that was enough to get the picture. There’s beatings, disappearances, shootings, broadcasts and declarations. The city is turned upside down.
In the midst of this, Ka bumbles around, trying to write poetry and not be involved in the coup. He says often that he is not interested in politics. In contrast to his friends, who seem to mix the artistic and political. (Muhtar, running for political office, hands Ka a sheaf of poems he hopes could be published in Istanbul. Nicep, a student active in the local religious movement, recounts a whole science fiction novel to Ka.) Ironically, we know that Ka was exiled to Germany for political reasons. Despite this tension, while in Kars, Ka tries his best to heed his muse and pursue his love. Well, you can guess how that goes.
Though there’s plenty of violence, there’s something farcical about the proceedings. We get scenes like this: Ka trying to sneak out of a meeting while dodging the police, only to sit down in the stairway to write a poem. The whole coup itself began during a theater performance gone astray, masterminded by the lead actor who is quite a character. When I looked up this book on Storygraph, I was surprised that only 8% of readers rated it as funny. I thought it was very funny.
The reason I really loved this novel though was this: I always go for a good meta-storyline and there’s a great one here. The novel is said to be written by someone else (“Orhan”), who is chasing the mystery of what happened to his dearly departed friend, Ka. Combing through Ka’s journals and visiting the places Ka went, Orhan tries to understand his friend. He’s most interested in the 18 poems that came to Ka when he was in Kars. In Ka’s notebook, he makes a discovery: Ka has drawn a snowflake and plotted each poem upon its points. “Lurking throughout these commentaries is the belief that his poetic materials were shaped by mysterious external forces. And by the time he was recording these thoughts in the notebooks, Ka was convinced that everyone had his own snowflake; individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one’s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of his or her own snowflake.”
One of the coolest things about this book? We learn all the titles of Ka’s poems, we see them come to him and him write them down, we even see him recite one. We hear about them again during Orhan’s quest to find and reassemble his manuscript. There’s even a tantalizing scene where Orhan is able to copy out one of Ka’s poems from listening to a tape. But for the entire 400+ pages? There isn’t a single glimpse of the poems themselves. It’s left to us to imagine his words. I love that!
Here is Ka’s snowflake. It would be fun to make one of your own.
