54 pages • 1 hour read
Orhan PamukSnow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Love, Religion, and Poetry: Muhtar’s Sad Story”
Ka considers calling the police about the murder at the pastry café but can’t find a phone. Instead, he goes to the headquarters of the Prosperity Party, where he sees Muhtar for the first time since university. Ka is irritated that Muhtar is running for mayor as an Islamist fundamentalist. During their days as students, Muhtar was a leftist. Muhtar tells Ka that he was saved from suicide by a Kurdish sheikh named Saadettin Efendi. Muhtar began attending religious meetings, which he hid from his then-wife, İpek. Muhtar’s conversion to Islam drove him and İpek apart, and they divorced. He began sending poems to magazines, but they were rejected. His hope lies in winning the election and becoming Kars’s mayor.
Chapter 7 Summary: “At Party Headquarters, Police Headquarters, and Once Again in the Streets”
The electricity goes off. Ka and Muhtar sit in darkness discussing what happened to their leftist friends from school. Muhtar asks Ka to tell İpek that he wants to remarry her. As Muhtar and Ka talk, the secret police (MIT) arrive to search the Prosperity Party’s office. They then take Ka and Muhtar to their headquarters. They beat up Muhtar and show Ka pictures of Islamists, but Ka does not recognize the shooter from the cafe.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Blue and Rüstem”
Ka arrives at Blue’s hideout. Blue is “extraordinarily handsome” with “midnight-blue eyes” (72). Blue tells Ka that publishing an article in a Western newspaper about the young women who have died by suicide will only create an uproar. Blue tells Ka the folktale of Rüstem, a Persian warrior, and his son, Suhrab.
In the story, a warrior named Rüstem travels from Iran to Turan and impregnates a princess who gives birth to Suhrab. Rüstem leaves a special wristband for his son and returns to Iran; years later his son learns that his father is a legendary warrior. Suhrab decides that he will go to Iran and depose its tyrant king so that his father can be king of Iran. Suhrab will then return to Turan and depose its king so that he and his father can together rule “the entire universe” (77). The father and son come head-to-head in battle without realizing whom they are fighting. On the second day of the battle, Suhrab has a chance to kill Rüstem but is told it is against Iranian tradition for enemies to “take away a head on the first occasion […] as it would be too crude” (78). Suhrab does not kill Rüstem, but Rüstem kills Suhrab the following day. He then sees the wristband and realizes he has killed his son. He weeps as he holds the dead body in his arms.
Blue points out that this story is no longer available to read anywhere because the Turkish people have fallen so deeply “under the spell of the West, [they]’ve forgotten [their] own stories” (78).
Chapter 9 Summary: “A Nonbeliever Who Does Not Want to Kill Himself”
Ka leaves Blue’s hideout and encounters three boys from the religious high school (Necip, Fazıl, and Mesut), who ask Ka if he believes in God. Fazıl asks how Ka, an atheist, can resist suicide. Ka is offended but then realizes that Fazıl is asking because he was in love with Teslime, one of the girls who died by suicide, and Fazıl fears that Teslime was secretly an atheist. Ka reassures Fazıl that he does not want to die. As they stand watching the falling snow, Ka feels creative inspiration.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Snow and Happiness”
Ka returns to his hotel room and composes a poem called “Snow.” İpek brings Ka a letter, and they kiss. İpek tells Ka that the director of the Institute of Education is alive but that his condition has worsened. Ka tells her about his visit with Blue, worrying İpek. Ka wants to read her the poem he just wrote, but she tells him to read the letter first. It is from Sheikh Saadettin and invites Ka to visit him. She tells Ka that he cannot refuse the invitation. Ka reads his new poem, and İpek says it is beautiful.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
Ka meets more of Kars’s citizens and gains a greater understanding of the nuances of life in Kars. Through dialogues on religion, politics, God, and the future of Kars, the author presents a diversity of viewpoints on the relationship between Turkey and the Western world. The language, imagery, and metaphor highlight Kars’s unique culture and environment.
Ka has a discomfiting reunion with Muhtar Bey, with whom he attended school. Muhtar’s transformation from a Marxist in his youth into an Islamist in his middle-age captures the complexities of Turkey’s political situation and the difficulties that Muhtar and Ka’s youthful idealism created for their lives as adults. The parallels between Ka and Muhtar make Ka feel uncomfortable, especially in terms of his attraction to İpek, whom Muhtar still loves and wants to remarry. Ka notices the comparable disappointments that he and Muhtar have suffered, as well as their shared sense of inferiority to Westerners. The latter is especially clear in the conversation they have about poetry, where Muhtar states that his poetry was rejected because it was about “the beauties of [their] country” rather than “pure poetry” (53), by which he means modern, Western poetry. The fact that both Muhtar and Ka are poets underscores the similarities between the two characters.
Ka admits that they have both accomplished little but that they can at least agree that “life’s been hard!” (52). As they recount what became of their many leftist friends from school, a grim picture emerges. Many were exiled, some were killed, and none have accomplished the goals that they set out to achieve in life. The author’s subversion of the clichéd happy reunion of old schoolmates foreshadows the tragedy of Ka’s death, which will resemble the deaths of many of his old classmates.
The loss of electricity (a frequent occurrence in Kars) accentuates the eerie mood of Ka and Muhtar’s conversation but also facilitates Muhtar’s openness about his unexpected shift from Marxism to Islamism: “[I]t [is] spooky” sitting in the darkness (58), but the darkness also creates a sense of intimacy. Muhtar is using politics to escape his sense of despair in his personal life after losing İpek. Ka reaches the uncomfortable conclusion that İpek represents the same thing for them both: an “escape from this defeatist mindset” (52). The use of politics as a means for accomplishing personal agendas is a theme throughout the novel, most clearly captured in the character Blue.
Blue represents a more extreme view on Islam than Muhtar does. He tells Ka the folktale of Rüstem and his son, Suhrab—an allegory that captures many of the emotions that will define Ka and Blue’s relationship, including distrust, jealousy, deception, and backstabbing. Ka’s betrayal of Blue to the authorities and subsequent death (in vengeance for Blue’s death) has the same tragic twist of fate as this allegory: In destroying his enemy, Ka destroys himself as well. The fact that Blue notes that the allegory has been forgotten is also a powerful statement on dispossession and the loss of cultural identity, as Ka is highly educated in Western literature but does not know this folktale.
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