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Snow
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Acclaim for Orhan Pamuk’s
Snow
“Powerful.… Astonishingly timely.… A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir.… [Snow] is forever confounding our expectations.”
—Vogue
“A novel of profound relevance to the present moment. [The] debate between the forces of secularism and those of religious fanaticism … is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses.”
—The Times (London)
“A work of art.… Alternating between the snowstorm’s hush and philosophical conversations reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s great novels, Snow proves a … timely and gripping read.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Marvelous … as quiet and transformative as a blizzard and as coldly beautiful.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues? … The author’s high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age’s crisis than any commentator could. Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Part political thriller, part farce, Snow is [Pamuk’s] most dazzling fiction yet. One of the top books of the year.”
—The Village Voice
“It comes as no surprise that political prescience should be yet another of the many gifts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. With Snow, Pamuk gives convincing proof that the solitary artist is a better bellwether than any televised think-tanker.… The work is a melancholy farce full of rabbit-out-of-a-hat plot twists that, despite the locale, looks uncannily like the magic lantern show of misfire, denial and pratfall that appears daily in our newspapers.”
—Independent on Sunday
“Pure magic.… Snow is excellent.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“ ‘How much can we ever know about love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?’ Such questions haunt the poet Ka … [in] this novel [that is] as much about love as it is about politics.”
—The Observer (London)
“Snow has already been a bestseller in Turkey—given Pamuk’s stature as a novelist and the novel’s content it could hardly fail to be. But what makes it a brilliant novel is its artistry. Pamuk keeps so many balls in the air that you cannot separate the inquiry into the nature of religious belief from the examination of modern Turkey, the investigation of East-West relations, and the nature of art itself.… All this rolled into a gripping political thriller.”
—The Spectator
“Brilliant.… Pamuk writes with such grace and deep respect for his conflicted characters that this rich novel passes like a dream, encompassing every aspect of love and belief.”
—People
Orhan Pamuk
Snow
Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Istanbul.
ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK
My Name Is Red
The White Castle
The New Life
The Black Book
Istanbul
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 2005
Translation copyright © 2004 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Turkey as Kar by İletişim, Istanbul, in 2002. Copyright 2002 İletişim Yayincilik A. Ş. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Pamuk, Orhan [date]
[Kar, English]
Snow / Orhan Pamuk ; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely—1st American ed.
p. cm.
I. Freely, Maureen, [date] II. Title
PL248.P34K36513 2004
894′.3533—dc22
2003065935
eISBN: 978-0-307-38647-2
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1_r1
To Rüya
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”
Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.
—Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma
Richard Howard’s translation
Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people.
—Dostoevsky, notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov
The Westerner in me was discomposed.
—Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Journey to Kars
2. The Outlying Districts
3. Poverty and History
4. Ka Meets Ïpek in the New Life Pastry Shop
5. The First and Last Conversation Between the Murderer and His Victim
6. Love, Religion, and Poetry: Muhtar’s Sad Story
7. At Party Headquarters, Police Headquarters, and Once Again in the Streets
8. Blue and Rüstem
9. A Nonbeliever Who Does Not Want to Kill Himself
10. Snow and Happiness
11. Ka with Sheikh Efendi
12. The Sad Story of Necip and Hicran
13. A Walk Through the Snow with Kadife
14. The Dinner Conversation Turns to Love, Head Scarves, and Suicide
15. At the National Theater
16. Necip Describes His Landscape and Ka Recites His Poem
17. A Play About a Girl Who Burns Her Head Scarf
18. A Revolution Onstage
19. The Night of the Revolution
20. While Ka Slept and When He Woke the Next Morning
21. Ka in the Cold Rooms of Terror
22. Sunay Zaim’s Military and Theatrical Careers
23. With Sunay at Military Headquarters
24. The Six-sided Snowflake
25. Ka with Kadife in the Hotel Room
26. Blue’s Statement to the West
27. Ka Urges Turgut Bey to Sign the Statement
28. Ka with Ïpek in the Hotel Room
29. In Frankfurt
30. A Short Spell of Happiness
31. The Secret Meeting at the Hotel Asia
32. On Love, Insignificance, and Blue’s Disappearance
33. The Fear of Being Shot
34. The Mediator
35. Ka with Blue in His Cell
36. Bargaining in Which Life Vies with Theater, and Art with Politics
37. Preparations for the Play to End All Plays
38. An Enforced Visit
39. Ka and Ïpek Meet at the Hotel
40. The First Half of the Chapter
41. The Missing Green Notebook
42. From Ïpek’s P