The Poet and the Terrorists

...Muhtar explains that his conversion was an escape from drunken despair...

...Written between 1999 and the end of 2001, it tells the story of a showdown between Islamist and secular extremists vying for the city's soul...

...Pamuk has mined classical tragedy and the modern thriller to construct a somewhat outlandish plot, but these time-honed contrivances never crowd out his characters...

...Like her younger sister, Ipek possesses an arresting beauty that makes Ka sound as much the schoolboy as his new friend Necip...

...Pamuk has matured beyond the obsessive doubling ofhis earlier work...

...For a time the number of the city's residents had dwindled to less than 10,000...

...He is bent on stamping out political Islam in Kars, even if only for a few days...

...The rest grope for meaning and act out their notions in moments of compassion and outbursts of cruelty...

...Two theatrical performances that erupt in violence punctuate Ka's visit, and threaten to exacerbate the suffering in Kars...

...Pamuk, the author of six previous novels (four of them translated into English), graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, lives in Istanbul and is by far Turkey's most renowned novelist...

...Tension mounts as Ka walks about Kars, interviewing people about the suicides, wooing Ipek, and stealing away into teahouses to jot down verses in his green notebook...

...They co-opt the police, cancel the elections, and impose martial law...

...The only magic at play in his new and thoroughly contemporary book is Ka's poetry, recharged by his reunion with Ipek and a blizzard that has sealed Kars off from the rest of the country...

...Their inevitable revelation propels the courtship down a calamitous course...

...Necip's ambitions point in that direction...

...The book's structure is a protracted reworking of Shakespearean drama, along precisely plotted slopes of civic upheaval, romance, betrayal, and revenge...

...On the other side, he meets a series of embittered, desperate men and a legion of hopeful, idealistic youth in their thrall...

...Individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one's own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries ofhis or her own snowflake...

...Today's poor, provincial Kars, rich in architecture left by the various imperial powers, is the wintry setting of Orhan Pamuk's deftly layered new novel...

...Although culture clash may not be "what is important," Pamuk's work is in fact pervaded by a doomed sense that it may be inevitable—a symptom of the human condition that makes each side "just like" the other...

...A few men in Kars would like nothing better than to serve Blue his martyrdom...

...She embodies an idea of Turkey for him—Westernized yetretainingaprovincial grace— and a last chance to seize happiness in life...

...And to secure his place in history, he intends to bring a few notorious Islamists down with him...

...Aboy from the religious high school, Necip, is infatuated with her as well and enlists Ka to deliver a batch of love letters to her...

...Early on, Ka and ipek witness the shooting of the director of the Institute of Education...

...The innocence and naïveté of the teenager lead Ka to confide to him that "The snow reminds me of God...

...The falling snow is a symbol whose value is in flux throughout the novel...

...He asks Ka about atheism and writing, and confesses an aspiration to move to Istanbul and become the world's first Islamist science fiction writer...

...Blue, the most charismatic and sinister Islamist, hints that his anti-Western views stem from a few alienating years spent as an immigrant worker in Germany...

...Ka's pursuit of her is a shedding of the ascetic cocoon of his Frankfurt exile...

...His encounter with the city exposes his own crisis of isolation, artistic inactivity and spiritual lethargy...

...Pamuk provides a transcript of the victim's conversation with his killer, one of several powerful, lengthy dialogues that lend the novel its philosophical heft...

...when with further inquiry, he discovered that the form of each snowflake is determined also by the temperature, the direction and strength of the wind, the altitude of the cloud, and any number of mysterious forces, Ka decided that snowflakes have much in common with people...

...The poems, in the manner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," are visions that seem to descend on Ka from an external source and must be transcribed immediately or lost...

...one senses here that Pamuk may be satirizing some of his own rivals...

...Telling the story at a remove of four years, in the wake of his hero's assassination in Germany, Pamuk explains that he has reconstructed the events around the drafting of Ka's last, lost collection...

...He toys with that grand escapist idea, martyrdom...

...An Istanbul newspaper has sent him to investigate a string of suicides by young women that has coincided with the banning of headscarves at the local Institute of Education, but it is the presence of Ipek Yildiz, an unrequited love from his student days, that has really drawn him here...

...They have instead produced epics based on native folklore or pop culture...

...His acting career in ruins, Sunay is terminally ill and has a death wish of his own...

...Beneath her physical radiance lurk emotional scars and potent secrets...

...She is more complex than she looks, however...

...This coup, capped by another playwithin-the-novel, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, an ur-Hamlet of sorts, is to be his swan song...

...Unlike many of the devout, who view Ka as an "oatmeal-hearted pseudo-European liberal," Necip approaches Ka with respect and curiosity...

...Few novels these days are at once so spacious, contemplative and laden with intrigue...

...Snow is part political thriller, part love story, and its twin plots converge with an intricate, tragic symmetry...

...The police set out to find the killer, hauling in Ka and another of his old friends, Muhtar, the Prosperity Party's candidate for mayor, who also happens to be Ipek's ex-husband...

...During a series of wars between the Ottoman and Russian empires in the late 19th century it changed hands, and after World War I it became part of a shortlived independent Armenian republic overtaken by the Bolsheviks...

...Pamuk has reached further, by painting his characters lavishly and plucking from Shakespeare and the English poets, instead of relying on fantastic devices...

...The real mastermind might be Sheikh Efendi, who holds court among the city's unemployed men and its youths, or Blue, a terrorist hiding in Kars who has taken as his mistress Ipek's sister, Kadife...

...At first it grants a sense of silence and purity, nudging the atheist toward an unfamiliar faith in God...

...Yet just as subtly and deliberately rendered is the psychosis, born of poverty and nourished by religious fanaticism, that has driven him so far over the edge—or left him so vulnerable to manipulation—that he could take a stranger's life...

...Ka gained fame as a sort of Turkish T.S...

...Speaking before a NATO gathering in Istanbul this June, Bush hailed Pamuk for building a "bridge between cultures" and went on to quote the author: "What is important is not a clash of parties, civilizations, cultures, East and West . . [but to realize] that other peoples in other continents and civilizations [are] just like you...

...Every voice is sounded out, each story told with candor, style and sympathy...

...The arrival of Kemal Atariirk's Army then resulted in the bloody expulsion of most of its population, prompting the Bolsheviks to return it to Turkey as a goodwill gesture...

...Like magic realism and science fiction, in Pamuk's scheme Islamism is a form of escapism from the frustrations of economic hardship and isolation, but a destructive one...

...A critique frequently leveled at magic realists, especially those from outside the West, holds that they have appropriated the form of the novel without appreciation for its roots in the realism of Flaubert and James...

...The passage Ka reads from a draft of Necip's novel recycles the trope of the double prominent in many of Pamuk's works...

...Kars is seen through the eyes of an outsider, Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka, a 37-year-old poet and former radical Leftist born in Istanbul who recently returned from more than a decade in Germany...

...The narrator, a friend of Ka's whose name happens to be the same as the author's, has painstakingly recreated a handful of days down to each conversation...

...Ka's notebooks reveal that after the journey to Kars he began the study of snow, "and one of his discoveries was this: Once a six-pronged snowflake crystallizes, it takes between eight and 10 minutes for it to fall through the sky, lose its original shape, and vanish...

...The boy is eager to embrace a Western phenomenon—science fiction—but determined to do so on his own terms...

...later it comes to seem "tiring, irritating, terrorizing...

...In the process, he has gained a reputation as a practitioner of magic realism...

...He has even attracted the notice of President George W. Bush, a statesman little known for his literary insights...

...But it is also a distraction from his burgeoning love affair with Ipek...

...The secularists he meets blame the burgeoning fundamentalist Prosperity Party—favored in the upcoming municipal elections—for turning innocent teenagers, including the suicide girls, against the policies of the state and their moderate parents...

...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen The city of Kars rests on a mile-high plateau at the edge ofTurkey's mountainous northeastern frontier...

...Ka and Muhtar had been romantic and literary rivals at the university in Istanbul, as well as cohorts in Leftist activism...

...It seems in part a self-parody...

...This is the work," a journalist tells Ka, "of the international Islamist movement that wants to turn Turkey into another Iran...

...Eliot, Muhtar got the girl...

...Their unlikely leader is the vaudevillian Sunay Zaim, a rabid nationalist in league with renegade secret service agents...

...A marriage proposal springs from his mouth early in the novel, and she greets it, and his declarations of love, with skepticism...

...The political maelstrom gives Ka the chance to play the level-headed hero in a town full of hotheads...

...Watching the police torture him, Ka senses that his old nemesis is too ineffectual and insufficiently cruel to have orchestrated the crime...

...During a staging of a little known 1930s Kemalist farce, My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, Sunay's henchmen turn their guns on the crowd...

...the poet Ka and the terrorist Blue stand at two extremes of a spectrum of sensitivity...

...A regional capital, it was a crucial stop on the silk road for much of its tumultuous history...

...Pamuk's is a rare and powerful performance...

...Ka's conclusions are born of poetic meditation on human problems...

...Muhtar seems a defeated man, divorced and unpublished (his pious poems, in "pure Turkish," are to Ka's ears laughably flat...

...For all the talk of God and politics in this novel, its real concerns are the choices and chances that accumulate in an individual life...

...These Islamists have put up posters that read, "HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOD'S MASTERPIECES, AND SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY"— but some of them are not above murder...

...He has repeatedly explored the implications of Turkey's position at the East-West nexus, often setting his works in the Ottoman past, as in The White Castle (1990) and My Name is Red (2001...

...The validity of the assassin's outrage is clear...