“Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others.”

The imagery of the young women’s suicides highlights the despair that the young women felt in their claustrophobic social and familial environments. The passage presents a framework for understanding the women’s deaths as arising in (and possibly from) a particular social context. In particular, it speaks to the contradictory religious and cultural pressures the women were under.

“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.