Snow is a novel of postmodern literary fiction published in Turkish in 2002 and in English in 2004. Snow won the Le Prix Médicis étranger award for the best foreign novel in France. The author, Orhan Pamuk, won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature and was the youngest person ever to receive this award. Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in Nişantaşı, Turkey. He studied architecture and journalism, only to decide to become a novelist immediately following his graduation from Istanbul Technical University. He writes in Turkish and has published 11 novels, including My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence. In 2006, Time named him one of its 100 most influential people in the world. His novels have been translated into 63 languages.

Snow draws on real-life events in Batman, Turkey, where suicides became endemic among Muslim teenage girls, and this guide contains discussions of suicide. The novel begins in a traditional third-person omniscient perspective, but in its second half, the novel switches between third-person omniscient and first-person perspective.

This guide refers to the 2004 Knopf Random House edition of Snow.

Plot Summary

The novel is set in Kars, an impoverished city on the eastern border of Turkey. The protagonist is a Turkish poet known as “Ka.” Ka fled his native Turkey as a political exile 12 years before and now lives in Frankfurt, Germany. Ka returns to Kars under the pretense of reporting on the rise in suicides among young Muslim women. However, Ka’s true motive for visiting Kars is that he hopes to marry the beautiful and elusive İpek Hanim, a former classmate who divorced her husband, Muhtar Bey, three years before. Ka has a plan: make İpek fall in love with him and convince her to come to Germany to be his wife.

When Ka arrives in Kars, he learns that a heavy blizzard has isolated the city from the rest of the world. He quickly falls head over heels for İpek and is inspired to write dazzling poetry, but his happiness stops short when he witnesses the murder of the director of the Institute of Education by a radical seeking vengeance for the suicides (one young woman died after her school expelled her for wearing a headscarf). A washed-up, megalomaniacal actor-turned-politician named Sunay Zaim takes advantage of Kars’s isolation to stage a violent leftist coup under the auspices of a play, called My Fatherland or My Head Scarf, that his theater company is performing.

Ka meets Necip, a charming and sensitive Islamist youth whom Sunay Zaim’s army kills; Blue, a mysterious and charismatic Islamist militant whom Ka both admires and fears; and Kadife, İpek’s younger sister and the leader of the “head-scarf girls,” who is romantically involved with Blue. Ka is torn between his secular, “European” point of view and his growing belief in God and sympathy for the people of Kars.

During three fateful, murderous days, Sunay Zaim and his crony, Z Demirkol, “enlighten” the citizens of Kars: arresting, interrogating, and murdering Islamist youth, torturing and beating suspected fundamentalists, and terrorizing the populace. The Kars television station and the Border City Gazette, a local newspaper owned by an eccentric man named Serdar Bey, are under Sunay’s control as well. Ka struggles to navigate the political intrigues surrounding him but finds bliss writing poetry and chasing İpek.

Ka is gravely disappointed when he discovers that İpek has a secret: She loved Blue and had a passionate affair with him during her marriage to Muhtar. The snow is thawing and the roads will soon open, which signals the end of Sunay Zaim’s coup, as the military will depose him as soon as Kars opens to the outside world again. Ka and İpek prepare to leave everything behind and find new happiness in Germany together as soon as they can leave Kars.

In a final bid to squash the Islamist fundamentalist movement in Kars, Sunay Zaim kidnaps Blue and offers a deal to Ka: If Ka can convince Kadife to remove her headscarf onstage during Sunay’s final theatrical production in Kars, Sunay Zaim will free Blue. Out of love for Blue, Kadife cooperates; Sunay frees Blue, who goes back into hiding to await the end of the coup. However, Ka’s overwhelming jealousy of Blue leads Ka to inform on Blue to Z Demirkol, and Blue is murdered. Ka’s treachery destroys İpek’s affection for him, and Ka leaves Kars alone, devastated. Kadife performs in Sunay Zaim’s play and removes her headscarf onstage. During the play, Sunay Zaim hands Kadife a gun that she believes is empty. Sunay Zaim tells her to shoot, and Kadife is shocked when, doing so, she kills him. The military arrives, the coup comes to an end, and order is restored in Kars.

Bewildered that he has lost the love of his life, Ka returns to Frankfurt and spends the last four years of his life miserable and heartbroken. Ka is shot in the streets of Frankfurt under mysterious circumstances, and the narrator, Ka’s childhood friend, is now seeking his murderer. He also hopes to recover Ka’s green poetry notebook, which contains the 19 poems Ka wrote while in Kars. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator reveals that he is the author, Orhan Pamuk, and he travels to Kars to discover the mystery of Ka’s death and his poetry.

Using postmodernist techniques that blur the lines between art and life, theater and politics, Orhan Pamuk examines literature’s capacity to depict the lives of the socially, politically, and historically marginalized. Just as the city of Kars is a microcosm of ancient and modern misunderstandings, the novel Snow is a microcosm that highlights the complicated relationships between Islamism and secularism, provincialism, and cosmopolitanism, and East and West.