"Snow" is the English title of a novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, originally published in Turkish as Kar. The work was finished in 2001 (in December, which is significant), was published in Turkish in 2002, and published in English in 2004. The novel is a contemporary work of what seems at first might be social realism, but that also includes aspects of surrealism or magical realism. The book covers several contemporary topics, but is not strictly about any of them.
The protagonist of the book is a man called "Ka", a poet who has been in exile in Germany for years, who returns to Turkey, and to the rural city of Kars in Turkey's east, to investigate a wave of suicides by young women, which is tied in with the secular governments restriction on head scarves. Although Ka is a poet, he takes the role of a journalist to uncover what is really going on in Kars, which is also in the grip of a blizzard and full of revolutionaries of different orientations, who have a confusing series of convenient alliances and personal connections. Ka also attempts to rekindle a romance, and finds himself lost in family feuds with both ideological and personal aspects.
In the early mid-section of the book, there is a massacre in a theater, and I must admit I was not sure about who the protagonists were, or what their motives were.
Part of the reason for my confusion is that the battle lines of the movements are hard to keep track of, and are opposite to what we experience in the United States. The military and police are the enemies of religious conservatives, for example. But part of it is also I think a deliberate exercise on the part of the author, as both we, and the narrator, are stuck in an isolated city, where ethnic rivalries, ideological differences, and interpersonal conflicts all unite to form a confusing tapestry that is magically realistic in its paranoia. It reminded me of another book with a similar setting and theme, The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson, and I will reuse a phrase from that review to describe this book: Orhan Pamuk confuses the reader about whether it is the objective progress of a plot that is important, or whether that is just a framing device to present personal experiences. And indeed, I still find myself confused.
Another obvious fact about the book is that most of it was written before September 11, 2001, but it was finished shortly after. As a book that deals in part with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, that event is obviously relevant, and it shows how much things have changed. In "Snow", the militant Islamists are very home grown, with goals that are usually limited to local issues. The squabbling in this book seems a long way removed from the two large wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were soon to follow, and from the globalization of conflict via social media that would characterize things in the coming decades. So in some ways, this book is a bit of a period piece of the pre-9/11 world.