Summary
Chapter 1
The novel opens with our protagonist, a man named Ka (his initials; his actual name is Kerim Alakusoglu) on the bus from Erzurum to Kars. While he sits, he contemplates the silence of the snow around him and reflects on the fact that his coat, which he purchased in Frankfurt, furnishes him with both a sense of security and marks him an outsider in this particularly provincial area. To Ka, snow is a symbol of childhood innocence and purity, and he hopes that this picture of his childhood will help him fit in at Kars.
Here, the narrator interjects, telling us that he is an old friend of Ka's, and that he is retelling this story from a future point (i.e., that he has knowledge of everything that will befall Ka in Kars). Ka spent the last twelve years in exile in Frankfurt, though he was never political. He only thinks of poetry, and is a deeply melancholic figure.
Ka falls asleep on his neighbor on the bus, and when he wakes, strikes up a conversation with him. They talk about the fact that the mayor of Kars had been murdered, and that Ka is a journalist sent to Kars in order to report on the recent suicides of many religious girls. The girls had been banned from wearing their headscarves by the secular government, and many see this as the reason they took their lives, so the media in Istanbul has been keen to report on the incidents.
Arriving in Kars, Ka emerges from the bus to see that the city is much "poorer and sadder" than he recalled (7). Campaign slogans are also strung up above every street, indicating an upcoming election. Ka then goes to his room at the Snow Palace Hotel and consistently runs into some familiar faces from the bus. Later, at the Green Pastures Café, he runs into these people again and realizes that they are the roaming theater troupe of Sunay Zaim, someone Ka had seen before in the 1970s. Additionally, Ka thinks that he sees a former member of the militant left in the café, but he notices that the man has been somewhat obscured. It is as if the snow that has covered the failing city has also blanketed its inhabitants and places in a haze.
Leaving the café, Ka returns to the Snow Palace Hotel in a mix of excited and dreadful feelings. He knows that his former classmate, Ipek, lives with her father and sister in the hotel. She used to be married to their mutual friend Muhtar, but now the two have separated, leaving her available. Though Ka barely knows her, he wants to seize this opportunity and get her to fall in love with him. Reporting on the suicides of the local girls is merely a coincidence that gets him to Kars on assignment for the Republican. Ka greets Cavit, the hotel clerk, then goes up to his room and thinks about Ipek. Later, in the middle of the night, Ka awakens and goes to the window to watch the falling snow.
Chapter 2
The next morning, Ka wakes and thinks to himself that the snow falling in Kars is fundamentally different from the snows of his childhood in Nisantas, Istanbul. Rather than speaking of innocence and purity, Ka looks around and sees that the snow really speaks to a broader desolation, desperation, and isolation. After getting ready, he then goes to visit Serdar Bey, the publisher of the local paper. They discuss Ka's dispatch to cover the local elections and the suicide of the local headscarf girls, and Serdar agrees to accompany Ka to the local police chief's office. On the way, Serdar points out the place the last mayor was assassinated over a dispute concerning an illegal balcony.
Arriving at the police station, Ka then meets with Kasim Bey, the chief of local police, who suggests that Ka have a plainclothes policeman tail him around the city for his safety. They then go around the city to the poorest areas of town, where Ka listens to the families of the downcast complain about their poverty, desperation, and unemployment. At the houses of those whose relatives committed suicide, Ka then hears the haunting tales about the deaths of the young girls. Though their methods were different—with one choosing a rifle, another choosing hanging, and a third choosing overdose—the suicides shared some elements in common. For one, each suicide followed the suicide of a girl from Batman, who took sleeping pills and seemed to inspire other girls in the town, including her cousin, to do the same. Ka reflects to himself how sad it was that these girls struggled to find private moments to kill themselves, having to take their own lives abruptly in the middle of their daily routines. Ka is also told by local officials that they worried about suicidal thoughts spreading like an illness, so they ask him to refrain from mentioning suicide too much around these families and the citizens of Kars, lest it catch on again.
Of all the stories that Ka hears on his first day in Kars, however, one in particular sticks out to him. It concerns the suicide of Teslime, one of the so-called "headscarf girls" that he is supposed to be investigating. When Teslime, a covered girl who followed all the prescriptions of Islam, was banned from wearing her hijab in school, her parents pressured her to take it off. The secular government, after all, had labelled the headscarf as a symbol of "political Islam," and made those who wear them appear as ideologically regressive. Nonetheless, she persisted and, because of her choice to wear the headscarf, was forcibly removed from the Institute of Education. This caused her to fall into a deep depression, and—though the local Islamists had cooperated with the government to condemn suicide—she hanged herself with her hijab after watching television and sharing tea with her parents.
Chapter 3
Ka reflects on his upbringing, a decidedly middle-class and republican life, and thinks to himself about how—after returning to Turkey from political exile—virtually everything had changed. His trip to Kars, then, is undertaken at least partially in the hopes that he will be able to breach the hazy barrier that keeps his childhood distant and enshrouded in mystery. At the same time, however, being faced with the sheer desolation and emptiness of Kars, he is being moved to something totally different to the casual indifference of his youth; rather, he is being moved towards obscure and conflicted feelings of faith in God (though he was never religious before).
Returning to his hotel, Ka then flips through some histories of Kars. Kars is a city that once—sitting as it does at the confluence of many important Near Eastern and Central Asian trade routes—saw a diverse coalition of Persians, Greeks, Georgians, Kurds, and more settle there. Later, after many wars and violent uprisings, the city was occupied by Armenian and Russian armies, after which it became an independent state before being conquered by the Turkish Republic. The Russian presence fit the Turks' Westernizing project exceptionally well, and the city's old mayor, Muzaffer Bey, tells Ka that this was the high point of Ka's history. The city saw a huge spike in interest towards global culture, fashion, and recreation. Now, Muzaffer decries, the city is desolate and consumed by divisive religious questions like the issue of the headscarf girls and their suicides. At this point, Ka refrains from asking more questions and thinks to himself about an old play that he read about, staged in Kars in the 1940s, which endeavored to convince young women not to cover their heads.
Later, Ka is told that Serdar Bey wants to see him immediately. On his way downstairs, Ka then runs into Ipek, who agrees to meet him and catch up at the New Life Pastry Shop. After seeing Ipek, Ka then reflects to himself that he returned to Turkey specifically to find a wife, and he admits his hopes to himself that Ipek will turn out to be the girl he marries. This thought makes Ka feel a great shame, since his irrational lusting after Ipek is not commensurate with his identity as a secular, Westernized intellectual. Moreover, Ka is the type of person who always denies himself personal happiness and normally refuses to seek happiness out on his own.
Ka arrives at Serdar's office, where he learns that Serdar's circulation is both small and full of government officials—as a result, Serdar is obligated to report on the accomplishments of the government. Serdar tells Ka that he had visited the wrong people after leaving him earlier that day, something he knows because Ka was being followed by the police. He tells Ka that the people of Kars are far too sectarian these days—with Kurdish separatists, Islamists, republicans, and the like all vying for control—and that the Islamists have an unfair advantage in elections because their religious zeal and promise of divine authority appeals to the poorest and most desperate of Kars. Serdar then tells Ka that the candidate for the religious party, the Prosperity Party, is Muhtar Bey, Ipek's ex-husband. Ka is worried about the possible end of his Westernized ways, and Serdar goes on to tell him about the Islamic mobilization in Kars. Among the evidence for this mobilization, he counts the local suicides as well as the presence of Blue, a well-known Islamist, in the city.
Serdar then shows Ka a copy of the following day's paper, which both introduces Ka to the city's readers and informs them that he will be reading a new poem, entitled "Snow," at a local performance. The performance in question is a play to be put on by Sunay Zaim and his company, a patriotic play called My Fatherland or My Head Scarf. Ka informs Serdar that he has no such poem and that he had no intention of reading at a local performance, but Serdar says in reply only that sometimes it is necessary to predict the future as a journalist. Ka then reads another story in the paper about the city being sealed off, with all roads in an out closed due to the heavy snowfall.
On his way out, Ka is stopped by Serdar once more, who tells him that Ipek's family is under a great deal of suspicion in Kars. After all, Serdar informs Ka, Ipek's ex-husband is involved in politics; her father, Turgut Bey, was an old Communist; and her sister, is rumored to be the leader of the headscarf girls.
Chapter 4
Ka walks to the pastry shop to meet Ipek with optimism, despite the bad news he just heard from Serdar. He feels like the romantic hero of a Turgenev novel, and the image of Ipek in his head is completely divorced with her real life and real actions. Even so, when she appears in person, the romanticism is shattered because she is even more beautiful than his mental picture of her. The two catch up and share small talk, and Ipek eventually asks Ka why he left Turkey in the first place. Ka tells her that he was tried for writing a political article that he did not even write after the military coup of 1980, so he hastily fled. Then, once in Germany, he tells her, he was unable to write a poem and was surrounded only by silence day and night, even on his long walks around the city of Frankfurt. He was unable to write poems out of this silence, and he was dismissed by both the local Germans and the expatriate Turks.
At this point, Ka notes to himself that there are only two other customers in the shop, a thin man and an old man patiently trying to explain something to him. Ipek points out the old man and says that he, Dr. Yilmaz, is the director of the local Institute of Education, where Kadife is a student. She talks about her split from Muhtar, a close friend of her and Ka's from their student days, and she also mentions that their marriage fell apart when she was unable to conceive. Moreover, she says, Muhtar's conversion to Islam was a major wedge between them. Ka replies to this claim about religion and asks Ipek why so many people are committing suicide in the city, and Ipek adeptly points out that only young women are doing so; the men simply give themselves to their faith.
Changing the subject, Ka then tells Ipek that he will need to talk to Muhtar as a part of his election coverage. Just after, he confesses to Ipek his love for her. She laughs this off as absurd, and instead tries to congratulate Ka on his poetry. Just then, the young man who is sitting with Dr. Yilmaz stands up and shoots him with a gun, killing him. As the man flees from the scene of this crime, Ipek and Ka decide to leave the shop as well. Ka is ashamed to have been present for this crime, but he is happy to share this intimacy with Ipek. Ipek tells Ka that Dr. Yilmaz was killed because he was not letting covered girls into the classroom, and when Ka asks Ipek whether they should report the issue to the police, Ipek says that they already know. She then tells Ka how to get to Muhtar, and she warns him that Muhtar wants to marry her again.
Chapter 5
This chapter takes us away from Ka and Ipek for a moment, and with the narrator, we reflect on the killing of Dr. Yilmaz. The narrator tells us that, at the time of the shooting, Dr. Yilmaz was wearing a tape recorder so that he would not have to be followed by MIT (intelligence officers) or police as a safety measure. The narrator then tells us that, years later, he was able to get a transcript of the recording from the Dr. Yilmaz's widow and daughter, who had since grown up to be a model.
The conversation between Dr. Yilmaz and his killer concerned the issue of the headscarf girls. The assassin asked Dr. Yilmaz what is more important—a decree from Ankara or a decree from God. From this innocuous starting point, their conversation comes to include the potential protective powers of the hijab (i.e., preventing rape and sexual harassment for women), the politicization of the headscarf issue to scapegoat women in the conflict between secularism and religious fundamentalism, and whether or not Dr. Yilmaz was actually able to make any decisions for himself with Ankara (and, perhaps even foreign powers) pulling the strings. The assassin threatened Dr. Yilmaz with a gun, and the doctor attempted to instill sympathy in the assassin by saying that his own wife wears a headscarf, and that he himself is a father to a daughter.
Seizing on the point of his daughter, the assassin accuses Dr. Yilmaz's daughter of being licentious and dreaming of being a film star. Dr. Yilmaz tells him that this is not true, and he says that his daughter thinks liberally and does not wear a headscarf. If a woman does not wear a scarf he says, she occupies a higher place in society and earns more respect. The assassin fiercely denies this, and he points to the fact that 90% of Turkish women cover their heads.
Their argument intensifies, and the assassin tells Dr. Yilmaz that he has been condemned to death by the Freedom Fighters for Islamic Justice. He then has Dr. Yilmaz read out his own death sentence, which sees him admit to being part of a pawn in a secret plan to secularize Turkish Muslims. He reads a part about Teslime, then objects to the statement in the sentence that she killed herself on account of her denial from the classroom, instead saying she took her own life over a broken heart. This angers the assassin even more, and Dr. Yilmaz begins to beg for his life, especially because he is a Muslim and does not condone suicide. Finally, the assassin tells Dr. Yilmaz that, ultimately, it was God who condemned the director to die. The assassin almost gave up after wandering aimlessly around Kars for days, and it was only a coincidence that he ran into the director at the café before his return to Tokat. He finally tries to get Dr. Yilmaz to say "God is great," but when Dr. Yilmaz refuses to yield, he shoots him and kills him.
Analysis
Despite covering just around 50 pages, these first several chapters are a key part of the novel constituting an introduction to Ka's personality, the political situation in Kars, and the specific situation of women in Kars. On a meta-textual level, this is also the place that we learn a lot about the novel's narrative frame, as well as some of the details that cohere the world of the novel. Finally, on the level of textual analysis, it is here that we see the emergence of many key elements that will come to define the narrative texture of the story—including Pamuk's use of foreshadowing, deployment of irony, and exploration of the relationship between artistic imagination and reality.
Regarding Ka himself, we learn a great deal of important information in these opening chapters. First, we learn that, like Orhan Pamuk himself, Ka is a fundamentally apolitical person who nonetheless saw the trajectory of his life changed by a short foray into politics. Second, we learn that Ka has an incredibly complex picture of his childhood and upbringing, with a mix of nostalgia and confusion about the past defining part of the motivation that brings him to Kars. Third, we learn that Ka has set a variety of strange boundaries for himself in order to see himself as a Western intellectual. These include his initial refusal to believe in God, his masochistic self-denial of pleasure and happiness, and his shame at being so in love with Ipek. All in one, Ka is a hopeless romantic and hopeless defeatist, an agnostic and spiritualist, and a nostalgic and indifferent person. This ambivalent and fundamentally unresolved sense of self in Ka is something that we will continue to explore throughout the text, and it is made to parallel the conflicted political situation in the city, the tension of womanhood in Kars, and the multivalence of the snowy weather in the city.
This serves as a nice segue into the politics of Kars, as well as the state of women in Kars. In Kars, we learn in these opening chapters that material poverty is directly antithetical to perceived spirituality in the city. This takes the form of the poorest in the city being most easily influenced by the Prosperity Party, as well as the distrust that central authorities (like Serdar) have for the poor (seen in the way that Serdar says Ka has visited the "wrong people" upon entering Kars). Moreover, we see that, regardless of the literal circumstances of Kars' politics, the media of the city is interested in sensationalizing the city's affairs. This is seen, for example, both in the narrative of the previous mayor's assassination and in the fact that the media exaggerates the link between the suicides in Kars and the conflict over the headscarves at the local schools (whereas, in reality, we only hear about Teslime's suicide as a link between the two issues). Finally, regarding politics in Kars, we see that the isolation and material deprivation in the city drives its inhabitants to violent sectarianism. We see evidence of this in the rampant surveillance of the city, as well as Kasim Bey's suggestion that Ka be tailed by a plainclothes police officer.
Regarding women, then, we get inklings here of a theme that will be developed later in the novel: that is, while men are relatively isolated from the effects of poverty and factionalism in Kars, women bear the brunt of the weight of the political disagreements. The headscarf being politicized is merely an example of women being scapegoated for a men's issue (i.e., the political clash between fundamentalism and secularism in the Turkish Republic), as Dr. Yilmaz says himself. At the same time, we also see that, where women are concerned, the conflict is not so one-sided; for example, despite the questionable merit of the assassin's asserted link between headscarves and safety, there is an irony in the fact that he is correct about the director's daughter being a model/public figure concerned with image. On the other side, consider the fact that the secularists claim taking off the headscarf will free women, while the reality remains that women are kept in a vulnerable position by having their clothing controlled. Neither side of the conflict is completely wrong, but the kernels of truth in each of their positions points to a larger truth of common people being victimized.
Finally, regarding the weather, we begin to see snow develop as another fundamentally conflicted, broadly defined, and important image. Just as Ka's emotional state, the plight of women in Kars, and the political situation in Kars are all tense and self-contradictory in their own ways, so too is the image of snow complicated and expanded in these opening chapters. From an image of childhood purity and innocence in Chapter 1, we evolve over the course of these chapters to an understanding of snow as something more fraught, complete with elements of obfuscation, confusion, and isolation. It is also important to note that snow is one of the only constants in the novel, something which reminds us of the ever complicating nature of life in a forgotten city as well as the omnipresence of desolation, suffering, and strange new hopes in Kars.
In terms of the novel's narrative frame, it is in these opening chapters that we begin to get a feel for our narrator. He is a writer himself, intensely concerned with the life of Ka and retracing the steps of his days in Kars (as well as what follows). Moreover, we know that the narrator was close to Ka in life, and as such, we are drawn from an early point to think of the commonalities between them. As our narrator comes into greater focus throughout the text, this becomes more and more important to track. Finally, as we begin to understand in these chapters through the material evidence of the taped conversation between Dr. Yilmaz and his killer, the narrator exits in a world outside of Ka's, though in its future, where the text we are holding in our hands (i.e., Snow), as well as the people and places in the city of Kars, are real. In essence, Snow is thus a kind of fictional historiography, relying on the verisimilitude of its evidence to convince us that its fictional world and events are real and tangible.
The narrative devices that come to define the text also find clear embodiment in these opening chapters. Particularly, irony runs throughout the text strongly and conveys the sense that we as readers know just too little to fully grasp the situations before us. For example, just as we think we get a clear picture of Ipek and her family, we learn that they are tied into the political scene of the city on a deep level. Consider also the aforementioned irony of Dr. Yilmaz's daughter turning into a model. These are just a few scattered instances. Foreshadow also is heavily deployed in the text to a similar effect, though foreshadow also reminds us of the text's historicity (i.e., that it is being written from a later date). Here, consider the reference to Sunay Zaim and his players, who will play a major role in the later parts of the text, as well as to Blue, a mysterious figure who comes into clearer focus in just a few chapters. Consider also the eerie type of prediction that Serdar Bey is able to do with his newspaper.
This then plays into our final point about the disconnect between artistic imagination and reality. While Serdar and his newspaper show us the artificial ways in which art and reality can be linked, these opening chapters seem to show us the ways in which artistic imagination is separate from the concerns of reality. Ka, for example, is aloof and recalcitrant because he is so concerned with his writing, but even this does not save him from political exile. Moreover, while people are killing themselves in Kars, ostensibly over the issue of the headscarf, the local artists are deciding to stage an old play about the conflict between patriotism and religious fundamentalism. Together, then, we get evidence here of the negative consequences of the disconnect between art and reality, an idea that will come to be reformed later in the novel.
