History and Literature are Interactive Forces

Literature has served as many functions throughout history. Writers such as Alexander Pope, Dryden and Defoe forever changed the way writing was done. Each writer in their own way has had an impact on other writings, as well as approaches to looking and judging other writings. Literature is a powerful tool which can be used to get your point across, or it can be used just for the enjoyment of the writer.

Snow is a novel in which there is a great deal of talking and not very much said. It is a disappointment not only because it comes from the Orhan Pamuk who wrote The White Castle (1979), which impressed on the appearance of its English translation in 1990, The Black Book (1990, English translation 1994) and The New Life (1993, 1997), but especially because it comes from the author of a flamboyantly rich picaresque-thriller-cum-art-history tour de force.

Always a metaphysical, determinedly intellectual writer, with echoes of Calvino, Borges and Paul Auster, Pamuk is also a daring voice combing subversion as well as an awareness of Turkey's extraordinary culture and the ongoing East-West, or Oriental-European, tensions that frustrate, confuse and intrigue all who explore them. This novel Snow is consistently at odds with its ambitions and achievement.

Apparently the source of much debate in Turkey, where it managed to outrage both Islamists and westernised Turks on its publication in 2002, it presents an unflattering, near-comic portrait of Kars as a place in which no one is all that sure of anything aside from the fact that several young girls have killed themselves. In tone, it is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's offbeat yarn The Unconsoled (1995). In common with that book it suffers from being very long, but whereas Ishiguro succeeded in making his novel's bizarre nature its ultimate strength, Pamuk's narrative merely emerges as longwinded and improvisational.

For all the sideswipes at the confused politics of several of the characters who are presented as revolutionaries but are in fact fanatics and failed lovers mainly at war with themselves, Pamuk has here missed an opportunity to consider the internal cultural confusions of a country that is as much torn between its notions of Europe and its place within that Europe, as Europe itself is confused about where exactly Turkey fits.

Snow is more than the title, it also describes a state of mind or, at least, the notion of perception as it exists within the book. Ka is a drifter whose politics are well overshadowed by his poetry and by his obsessional love for Ipek, a girl whose beauty is one of the major themes in the narrative. Once in Kars, Ka - whose name also means snow - begins writing poems with frenzy akin to the way other people suffer panic attacks. The poems simply happen.

At no time does it seem that he will be writing any news story. For a western reader, there is something very confusing about this novel in that Pamuk himself does not seem to have ...