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Frankfurt Book Fair 2008 in Germany
The Nobel Prize in Literature
Turkish Author Erendiz Atasu
Nobel Winner Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” is a deep, soul-searching, philosophical novel. It is set in the early 1990s in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia. The novel shows the complexities and the dilemmas of modern Turkey including the conflict between secularism and Islamism, poverty, headscarf ban and unemployment.
Losing What They Are
Snow offers breathtaking portrait of Kars and its residents, who are “poor but not stupid”. For the three days, the town is cut off by heavy snow. Trapped in Kars, Ka goes deep to understand Turkey,Armani Sunglasses Outlet Online A Selection of the, which seems unable to know itself, haunted by its past and divided over its future.
The poet Ka is the novel’s main character. He is an educated, westernized Turk from a middle-class family in Istanbul. Everyone in Kars considers him a non-believer, but he is in doubt, sometimes he sees God in the snow, sometimes when he is writing his poems.
“Snow” is a work of art novel and an essential reading. It is as much about politics and society ills as it is about love and passion.
As Ka investigates the epidemic of suicides among the town's young women,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], forbidden to wear headscarves in school, his discoveries shock him. “The thing that shocked and frightened Ka was the way these girls had killed themselves: abruptly, without ritual or warning, in the midst of their everyday routines.” (p.13)
Pamuk also questioned the success of Kemal Ataturk’s modern Westernized Turkey, which seems to be a reflection of Russia to some extent. He quotes an epigraph from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent, because the European enlightenment is more important than people.”
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Ipek’s sister, Kadife, the leader of the headscarf girls – who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair – gives him the perfect answer, “While men kill themselves when they have nothing left to lose, women commit suicide to avoid losing what they are.” (p.115)
In Kars, things are twisted. The local paper prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there is nothing on. Ka’s days are nothing but normal. While he is in Kars, he witnessed the political murder of the head of a college who has tried to ban pupils from wearing headscarves. Later, a play about a girl who burns her headscarf, called “My Fatherland or My Scarf” turns into a bloody coup.
Modern Turkey
Publi
Trapped in Kars
Ka returns to Istanbul for his mother's funeral, after living in Frankfurt, Germany for more than a decade. He travels to Kars on a journalistic assignment from a secularist newspaper, to cover the municipal elections and an apparent suicide epidemic among the Muslim women there. Ka has another reason for being in Kars, he wants to meet Ipek, the love of his life.
Snow manages to give voice to everyone involved, both the liberals and the fundamentalist, secular and Islamists. While, the secularists do not want see Islamists as human beings, but as fanatics,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych],[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the Islamists, who would like to portray themselves as idealists, see the secularists as heretics.
Why they killed themselves, Ka asks. Some say they are protesting against the headscarves ban, others say it is because they are beaten at home. The Islamists, however, consider the girls who commit suicide not even Muslims, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives.