Snow

“Ka loved Turgenev and his elegant novels, and like the Russian writer Ka too had tired of his own country’s never-ending troubles and come to despise its backwardness, only to find himself gazing back with love and longing after a move to Europe.”

The novel often alludes to Russian literature, reflecting both Ka’s and the author’s affection for world literature. The comparison between Ka and Turgenev captures the conflicted feelings many non-Western writers throughout history have felt toward the West.

“Of course, the real question is how much suffering we’ve caused our womenfolk by turning head scarves into symbols and using women as pawns in a political game.”

The director of the Institute of Education tells his assassin this before his death. The metaphor of women as pawns emphasizes the role of women in politics and the symbolic significance of the headscarf, highlighting the destructiveness that the politicization of headscarves has produced in Kars.

“Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it’s not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls.”

Blue tells Ka this when he is speaking about his (Blue’s) time of exile in Germany. The statement explores the themes of shame and self-loathing, especially in terms of the emotions non-Westerners feel toward Westerners. Blue’s simultaneous revulsion and fascination with the West become more evident as the narrative progresses.

“[A]s he gave his mind over to all the other little things that make up a life and realized how they all added up to a unified whole, he saw a snowflake […]”

Ka feels poetically inspired for the first time in years after his conversation about God with Necip, Fazıl, and Mesut. The symbolism of the snowflake as a form of wholeness and unity also reflects Ka’s lifelong wish for happiness, which always eludes him. The snow’s importance as a plot device and its symbolism as a metaphor for the human soul become intertwined throughout the story.

“If God does not exist, that means heaven does not exist either. And that means the world’s poor, those millions who live in poverty and oppression, will never go to heaven. And if that is so, then […] What are we here for, and why do we put up with so much unhappiness, if it’s all for nothing?”

At Lucky Brothers Teahouse, Necip asks Ka this question. Necip’s caring personality and idealism lead him to consider the plight of the poor and the unhappy. The word “millions” emphasizes the huge number of people who are oppressed worldwide, and the difficult question Necip poses to Ka leaves Ka without any easy answers.

“‘I’m not all that afraid of becoming someone else,’ said Hande. ‘What scares me is the thought of never being able to return to the person I am now—and even forgetting who that person is. That’s what makes people commit suicide.’”

Hande speaks about the relationship between identity and the suicides among Kars’s young women. Her reasoning—that the fear of losing one’s identity can lead one to consider simply ending one’s life—illustrates her frank and vulnerable personality and empathy. The author approaches the sensitive issue of suicide by providing a variety of interpretations from characters with different perspectives.

“I looked it up in an encyclopedia once, and it said that the word atheist comes from the Greek athos. But athos doesn’t refer to people who don’t believe in God; it refers to the lonely ones, people whom the gods have abandoned. This proves that people can’t ever really be atheists, because even if we wanted it, God would never abandon us here. To become an atheist, then, you must first become a Westerner.”

Ka says he wants to be a believer and a Westerner, but Necip tells him that he cannot be both. The language of loneliness and abandonment that Necip uses portrays the unhappiness and desperation that Ka feels as he searches for human connection in Kars. Many dialogues throughout the novel explore the existence of God and the desire to escape one’s own alienation through belief.

“All he wanted to do now was sit quietly and look at İpek, but he knew it was out of the question; the house, ablaze with revolutionary fever, made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the bad memories of military takeover during his childhood; it was the fact that everyone was talking at once.”

Following the coup at the theater, Ka desires only to escape from the uproar and seek peace in his poetry and his love for İpek, but he cannot do this. The imagery of “ablaze” and “fever” suggests fire, heat, and destruction. The reference to memories of similar events during Ka’s childhood alludes to the political instability in Turkey in the mid- and late 20th century, which included several coups and moments of political fracturing.

“[A]s he drew closer to the dead boy’s white face, something inside him shattered too.

It was Necip, his lips still pushed forward as if to ask one more question […] That same childish face, the same little pimples he’d seen earlier, the same aquiline nose, the same grimy school jacket […] [I]n the middle of the forehead on which he’d pressed the palm of his hand only yesterday, was a bullet hole.”

The attention to detail in this moment emphasizes the suddenness of Necip’s death and the fact that he was so young. The imagery, such as a school jacket and pimples, evokes childhood and innocence. That Ka touched Necip’s now marred forehead the day before emphasizes the shock and grief that Ka feels.

“The detective assigned to the snack bar subjected the granny’s cinnamon drink to yet another examination, and he also inspected the glasses, the heat-resistant holder on the crooked handles of the tin ladles, the change box, several rusty holes, and the employees’ hands for any sign of a strange powder. A week later, he too had all the symptoms of poisoning […]”

The story of the detective investigating a case of poisonous cinnamon sharbats references the political conflict between Kurdish nationalists and the Turkish government. The image of the detective infiltrating and thoroughly investigating a Kurdish grandmother’s drink stand is absurd, contrasting the horror and fear in Kars after the coup with a moment of lightheartedness. This story highlights Turkey’s complex ethnic and political history.

“[…] Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.”

This moment explicates Ka’s view of poetry and the relationship between poetry and everyday life. The description of the poet escaping away from the center of life is a metaphor for Ka’s isolation and his choice to separate himself from the political and social world in favor of his poetic visions.

“[H]e used the same words and ideas that had ruined his life […] So it was with the elation of a twenty-year-old that he repeated those thoughts and ideals that had so upset his mother, who had been right in wishing that he would never become a poet, and which had condemned him to exile in a rathole in Frankfurt. Meanwhile he was well aware what the passion of his words said to İpek: This is how passionately I want to make love to you.”

The image of Ka’s dwellings in Frankfurt as “a rathole” emphasizes the deception that Ka is engaged in at this moment. Ka is being “a rat” because he is deceiving Turgut about what he believes so that he can sleep with İpek. However, Ka views his passionate lying as forgivable because it is an expression of his desire for İpek. Ka’s lack of firm ideals and his prioritizing of happiness and love above all else are clear in this moment.

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? […] [W]hen Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?”

The use of the author’s identity as the novel’s narrator is an instance of self-referentiality. This self-referentiality distances the reader from any sense of certitude that they might take away from reading the novel. By pointing out his own limitations in understanding his friend Ka, the author is also pointing out our inevitable failure to fully understand those who have had very different lives and experiences.

“People might feel sorry for a man who’s fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It’s all a joke: their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought that way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants’ culture and sometimes even pretend to think of them as equals.”

A Kurdish youth gives one of the most striking statements on the situation of the people of Turkey in relation to the West. The imagery of mopping floors and the descriptions of laughter and pity evoke the situation of all oppressed people worldwide, not just the situation of the Turkish people. The passage depicts shame as a universal phenomenon among impoverished people.

“[…] the banners for the Motherland Party, the little window hidden behind those tightly drawn curtains, the slip of paper someone had taped to the icy window of the Knowledge Pharmacy to announce that the shot for the Japanese influenza had finally arrived, the yellow ant suicide poster—every last one of these little details would stay with him for the rest of his life […] So certain was he that ‘everything on earth is interconnected and I too am inextricably linked to this deep and beautiful world,’ he could only conclude another poem was on its way […] But the poem never arrived.”

The small details of Kars’s landscape give a strong visualization of the poetic inspiration that Ka finds in the city and illustrate the way that Ka’s memory latches onto these images. The style of the language and the description of a poem that never arrives emphasize Ka’s immersion in his environment.

“‘If you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,’ said Kadife.”

The theme of the elusiveness of happiness is one that the novel explores deeply. As they argue about whether Kadife should uncover her head, Ka’s and Kadife’s different worldviews clash. This foreshadows Ka’s future unhappiness: Ka’s prioritization of happiness above all else (even his own morals) causes the loss of İpek’s love and his depression for the last four years of his life in Germany.

“They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Afterward, he would return to this moment many times, and each time he would feel great remorse; happiness had blinded him to the fury in Blue’s eyes […]”

Blue’s jealousy and anger manifest in the imagery of his fiery blue eyes after Ka tells him about his relationship with İpek. The inclusion of the detail that they smiled at each other emphasizes Ka’s gullibility. Ka’s regret over sharing his love for İpek with Blue emerges in the language the author uses, especially the words “each time,” which show that Ka will think often of his mistake.

“[T]he male dramatists who invented these stereotypes could not see a heroine expressing a notion any deeper or more refined than eroticism or social duty. Funda Eser used these roles to splendid effect in her life offstage, and to a degree these male dramatists would have scarcely anticipated.”

The actress Funda Eser represents a view of femininity that starkly contrasts with the conservative, religious emphasis on female purity. Funda Eser’s bawdy stage performances and risqué persona initially appear to draw on their own stereotypes of femininity. However, the narrator notes that Funda Eser’s personality is far deeper than these performances suggest and that she takes these roles and makes them more expansive and less stereotypical in her personal life.

“‘Do you want me to tell you why I love Marianna?’ he said, when the soap opera resumed. ‘Because she knows what she wants. But intellectuals like you, you never have the faintest idea […] You say you want democracy, and then you enter alliances with Islamist fundamentalists. You say you want human rights, and then you make deals with terrorist murderers. You say Europe is the answer, but you go around buttering up Islamists who hate everything Europe stands for. You say feminism, and then you help these men wrap their women’s heads.’”

There is an irony and dark humor to the fact that Z Demirkol and his henchmen are watching the Mexican soap opera Marianna, just like everyone else in Kars. The invectives that Z Demirkol launches against Ka, whom he views as an indecisive intellectual, have a truthfulness that complicates Z Demirkol’s status as a total villain. Though Demirkol is a heartless murderer, it is he who speaks the most incisive critique of Ka’s wavering ideals.

“To live in indecision, to waver between defeat and a new life, offered as much pleasure as pain. The ease with which they could hold each other and cry this way made Ka love her all the more, but even in the bitter contentment of this tearful embrace a part of him was already calculating his next move […]”

The imagery of pleasure and pain as Ka and İpek hold each other highlights the inner turmoil Ka experiences after learning of İpek’s affair with Blue. The repetition of “to” and the description of Ka crying while he is calculating his next move capture the dissonant emotions that Ka is experiencing and foreshadow his later decision to inform on Blue.

“In any event, I shouldn’t want my readers to imagine that I was trying to become his posthumous shadow. As Ka had so often suggested to me, I simply did not understand poetry well enough, not the great sadness from which it issues, and so there had been a wall between us, a wall that now divided me not just from the melancholy city describe in his notes but from the impoverished place I was now seeing with my own eyes.”

By using the image of a shadow, the narrator disavows any attempt even to imitate Ka. The metaphor of “a wall” captures the distance between individuals, despite what one might assume to be the connecting force of literature; the particular nature of poetry is here another obstacle to understanding. The narrator exhibits his humility as he embarks on the difficult task of grieving his lost friend.

“A woman doesn’t commit suicide because she’s lost her pride, she does it to show her pride

[…]

 The moment of suicide is the time when they understand best how lonely it is to be a woman and what being a woman really means.

[…]

But […] [a]ll they achieved by killing themselves was an even greater loneliness.”

During the performance of The Tragedy in Kars, Kadife argues against Sunay’s simplistic thoughts on why young women are dying by suicide. Kadife emphasizes loneliness’s role in suicide, connecting this loneliness to the situation that the young women were facing not by virtue of their religious beliefs but by virtue of their burgeoning womanhood and its implications.

“Ka had located ‘The Place Where God Does Not Exist’ at the very top of the Memory axis. This suggested to me that he had been to the deserted dormitory Z Demirkol and his friends had used as their base at the tail end of the coup, had looked through Necip’s window, and so discovered, just before leaving Kars, the true origins of Necip’s landscape. All the other poems on the Memory axis referred to his childhood or his own memories of Kars. So now I too was sure of the story all of Kars had always believed to be true: after Ka had failed to persuade Kadife to give up the play, and while İpek was sitting locked up in his room, he’d gone to pay a visit to Z Demirkol, who was waiting in his new headquarters for Ka to tell him where to find Blue.”

When Fazıl takes Orhan to the boys’ religious high school, Orhan unexpectedly finds the answer to the mystery at the heart of the book. The narrator uses the snowflake diagram from Ka’s journal to uncover it, as he cannot believe that his friend, the beautiful poet, would be responsible for a man’s death. Orhan’s disbelief and finally acceptance of his friend’s terrible choice reflect concepts of certainty and doubt. The mystery is deeply buried, hidden within Ka’s lost poetry.