Bill curates is an occasional series where I delve into Sue’s vast archive, stretching back to May 2009, and choose a post for us to revisit.
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My original post titled: “Orhan Pamuk, Snow”
One of my rules of reading is that when I have finished a book I go back and read the first chapter (or so) and any epigraphs the author may have included. These can often provide a real clue to meaning. This rule certainly applies to my latest read, Snow, by Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk.
(WARNING: SOME SPOILERS)
Snow, in fact, has no less than four epigraphs:
- lines from Robert Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” describing the paradoxical nature of things: “the honest thief, the tender murderer,/the superstitious atheist”;
- a quote from Stendhal’s The charterhouse of Parma which warns about the ugliness of “politics in a literary work”;
- a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notebooks for the Brothers Karamazov which suggests ideals like the European Enlightenment are “more important than people”; and
- Joseph Conrad’s statement in Under Western eyes that “The Westerner in me was discomposed”.
These four epigraphs pretty well sum up the concerns of the book. What about the title? The second chapter begins with:
Veiling as it did the dirt, the mud and the darkness, the snow would continue to speak to Ka of purity, but after his first day in Kars, it no long promised innocence.
Here then is the first paradox: snow is pure but not innocent, and it covers dirt, mud and darkness. Already, you can see that this book is going to be ironic. Just how ironic though is a matter for contention but my suspicion is that its very foundation is ironic, as it grapples with what it means to be an artist in a political society, with how one is to live in a conflicted nation. The plot centres on a coup – a coup which is variously called a military coup and a theatrical coup! In fact, it is a coup by a theatrical group that is supported by the military! Art and politics could hardly be more entwined.
Snow though is not an easy read. It is my third Pamuk, but only the second one I have completed. I loved his memoir-cum-history Istanbul but could not, hard as I tried, finish My name is red.
What then is it about? The main action covers three days in the life of Ka, a Turkish poet recently returned from 12 years exile in Germany, who comes to Kars (in far east Turkey) ostensibly to write about the suicide epidemic among young women, but whose secondary (or perhaps primary!) reason is to fall in love with an old school-friend, Ipek. Soon after he arrives, however, the coup occurs and Ka is, rather unwillingly, caught up in the intrigue between the competing interests: the secularists, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the Kurdish nationalists. This sets the stage for exploring the art-politics nexus. Ka says to Sunay, the leader of the coup AND of the theatrical troupe that comes into town:
I know that you staged the coup not just for the sake of politics but also as a thing of beauty and in the name of art … you know only too well that a play in which Kadife bares her head for all of Kars to see will be no mere artistic triumph; it will also have profound political consequences.
Here then is one evocation of the second epigraph. The third and fourth epigraph refer to the running conflict in the book between European/Western values and Turkish/Eastern values. There is very much a sense that the people of Kars feel condescended to by European culture, but as a teen-ager says at one point, “We are not stupid! We’re just poor”. The people of Kars do not understand Western notions of individualism, and they see Western ideas of secularism and atheism as equating with immorality. Ka, as a Westernised Turk, acts as an uncomfortable, to him, bridge between the two worlds.
The core of the book is Ka. He is a sad and highly conflicted individual who, in his youth, had used words to argue that people should act for “the common good” but now finds himself using them to further his own happiness. Once politically active, “he now knew that the greatest happiness in life was to embrace a beautiful, intelligent woman and sit in a corner writing poetry”. The irony is that, for all his attempts to achieve this, he ends up with neither and dies four years after the coup a sad and lonely man.
The novel is interesting, stylistically and structurally. It is essentially a third person story about Ka but is told by a first person narrator, Ka’s friend, the novelist Orhan(!). This metafictional narrative technique, by adding another layer to the “conversation”, rather deepens the “artist in society” and art/politics themes of the book. Much of the story is foreshadowed: we learn of Ka’s death in Chapter 29, though the book has 44 chapters. The tone of the book is imbued with huzun, that very particular Turkish sense of melancholy that Pamuk explores beautifully in his book Istanbul. And, while it is about a coup and has a body count of 29, there are some very funny scenes, one being the political meeting at which the competing rebels prepare a statement about their beliefs for the Western Press. Anyone who has attended a political meeting will feel at home here!
All this said, the book is a challenge to grasp: there are a lot of characters, comings-and-goings, and ideas to track. Just why Ka is the way he is, just what did happen to him in the end, and just what Orhan is saying about art and politics are hard to pin down. I love the way the book is underpinned by paradox and irony – and yet at times the meaning can be a little tricky to discern. What is clear though is that Ka has found living by his political beliefs deeply unsatisfying but, ironically, is unable to bring about a situation in which he can live “happily” any other way.
Kadife, the leader of the headscarf girls, says (fairly early in the book):
…do not assume from this that our religion leaves no room for discussion. I will say that I am not prepared to discuss my faith with an atheist, or even a secularist. I beg your pardon.
Oh dear! Some reviewers call it a brave book. With its fearless exploration of the tensions in modern Turkey, it certainly feels that way. I am very glad that I put in the effort to read it.
Translated by Maureen Freely
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I know what Bill means. I too keep stumbling across authors I should know but have never heard of. I would like to read more Pamuk, including The museum of innocence which is on my TBR. Meanwhile, though, my heart really belongs to his mesmerising memoir, Istanbul. I’d love to read it again.
Have any of you read Pamuk? If so we’d love to hear what you think about his writing.
In the last couple of months of my Mum’s life I bought her a few novels that I thought would give her pleasure. Although we didn’t know, then, how dire her health was, I did know that she was tired and needed good but not overly demanding or depressing reads. So, for Easter, I gave her Pip Williams’ The dictionary of lost words; for Mothers Day, I gave her Sulari Gentill’s A few right thinking men and Anna Goldsworthy’s Melting moments; and, then, when she went into hospital, I bought her Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the side of the road. Being the lexicographer she was, she loved The dictionary of lost words. She took A few right thinking men into hospital and read two-thirds of it before tiredness defeated her. She was finding the historical background really interesting, but she was keen to get onto Tyler whose books she’d read before. Unfortunately, she never did, but I picked it up as I sat by her bed on the last day of her life. It’s a long time since I’ve read Tyler, but it turned out to be the perfect book for my current state of mind. Even so, it took me two weeks to read it …
Anyhow, here is a brief recap of my thoughts on 
Related, I suppose, to the coming-of-age issue is the theme of learning to accept being ordinary. After Sando and Loonie leave the first time, Pikelet goes out and surfs Old Smoky: the first time he does it he’s so successful he feels he’s not ordinary, but then in his overconfidence he does it again and nearly does himself in…this is the beginning of his changing point of view. As he says a little later when he reviews his relationship with Eva, “No, Eva was not ordinary. And neither was the form of consolation she preferred. Given my time over I would not do it all again”. In other words, while he had originally equated not being ordinary with doing big risky things, with courting fear, by the end of the novel he realises that life is “a tough gig” and is about more than courting fear and taking big risks. This doesn’t mean that he can’t do and enjoy a job that provides an andrenalin rush (paramedic/ambulance driver) but it does mean that he no longer seeks to be anything other than himself and that he now goes for an adrenaline rush in “safer” more acceptable ways.
Favel Parrett’s third novel, There was still love, is one of those novels in which not a lot happens but has a lot going on. Just the sort of novel, really, that I tend to like. (It all started with Jane Austen!)
I have reviewed (and enjoyed) two of Christos Tsiolkas’ books since blogging – 
On whether the pandemic is affecting their thinking about their writing. Viggers, a practising vet, said she is still consumed with the summer bushfires. She is interested – horrified? – to see how politicians have engaged with scientists on the pandemic, when they haven’t done so regarding climate change and bushfires. Her writing content is not really affected. Robinson said it’s tricky trying to write about something unfolding at present, and she feels sheepish saying she’s trying to write about it. Mundell commented that she’s been obedient when she’s usually not, and has felt paranoid when others haven’t been doing the right thing. This made me laugh, as I tend to be obedient but I haven’t felt at all paranoid!
I joined during the discussion of intergenerational trauma. Morton shared his mother’s statement, “I don’t hate your father, I feel sorry for him”. You do inherit these things, he said. He wrote his book carefully because he wanted to show the impact on him but didn’t want to make his father a villain. (How generous and understanding!) That said, he, his mother and sister have determined they “will never let this cycle of abuse continue”.
On whether the women are true friends given the evident tensions. This is an issue discussed in my own reading group, but we felt exactly the way Wood responded. Yes, she said, they love each other. Their remarks about each other are a reflection on their own anxieties. Some readers, she said, don’t think her characters are likeable. Grrr … this is an issue that really bothers me. Why do characters have to be likeable? Smith asked the right follow-up question …
I loved that this session, which followed forest ecologist David Lindenmeyer’s keynote address, included an historian, Tom Griffiths, as well as fiction writers, Tony Birch and Alice Bishop.
Regarding optimism for the future, Birch said he is concerned about our lack of foresight, about the fact that thinking does not extent beyond the next election cycle. Griffiths said the recent school protests give him hope but, like Birch, he is pessimistic about federal leadership. Bishop said she had hope in stories, but not much in leadership!
Most readers, and I am one of them, love hearing about the writing process. Hastrich said that she was “not a fluid writer”. She finds “a few good sentences and images and writes around that”. She is obsessed with her 1964 Roget’s thesaurus, because the way it groups meanings under words helps you find the exact word you need. (I still remember when I fell in love with my 1962 edition.)
I won’t talk a lot about Mammoth – it is on my TBR, so I’ll get to it soon-ish – but in terms of his inspiration for the story, Flynn said he thought about these massive creatures observing what was going on around them and how all of that was lost when they died. He loved the idea that all that information could be retained in the fossil.
Hills talked about how she wrote quickly on the road. Typing in the car, though, was not easy, so she used voice recognition software, party because it also enabled her to capture a storytelling tone. However, this software had unexpected benefits. Firstly, it would sometimes guess her words, and that guess was sometimes more poetic than her own language. Most fascinating though was that the software would pick up other sounds – birds, the wind – and turn them into words too. Not only did this help her – teach her to – listen to country, but it added another layer to the writing, resulting, for example, in wind sounds and a talking bird featuring in her story. The process, then, became part of the content of the book. Writing this way has given her new ways of relating to the natural world, so she no longer feels separate from it.
Whispering Gums 