Snow

Ka, a poet who has spent twelve years in political exile in Frankfurt, comes to the snowbound eastern city of Kars ostensibly to report on a cluster of suicides among teenage girls forbidden to wear headscarves in state schools, though his real motive, never quite admitted, is Ipek, a former classmate now separated from her Islamist husband. Pamuk sets the entire novel over three isolated days when snow cuts Kars off from the rest of Turkey, and uses that isolation to compress the country's largest argument, secularism against political Islam, into a town small enough for every faction, the state's soldiers, an Islamist militant known as Blue, a theater troupe touring propaganda plays, Kurdish nationalists, to end up in the same handful of teahouses and hotel lobbies.

Snow itself is the novel's most worked symbol, and Pamuk is unusually precise about it: Ka, watching flakes fall outside his hotel window, sketches a snowflake with six unique arms and privately assigns them to reason, memory, and imagination, then uses that diagram to organize the nineteen poems that arrive in him, seemingly whole, during his three days in Kars. The poems function as the novel's great absence, since Ka writes them down in a green notebook that later goes missing, so that a book obsessed with the specific, recoverable texture of political conviction spends its own central artistic achievement permanently out of reach, both to its narrator and to the reader.

Pamuk builds his cast so that no faction gets the last word: Blue is charismatic and ruthless in the same breath, the secularist actor-director Sunay Zaim stages a literal military coup from inside a theater performance without the novel ever treating him as merely a monster, and the headscarf girls themselves are never allowed to become simple martyrs, since Kadife, the most prominent of them, has reasons for wearing hers that have as much to do with love and defiance as with faith. The effect is a novel that keeps refusing the reader's hope for a side to root for, precisely because Pamuk thinks Turkey's actual argument does not have one.

The novel's central set piece has Sunay Zaim's touring company perform a satirical play called My Fatherland or My Headscarf for a live Kars audience and, unannounced to almost everyone watching, actual soldiers on stage open fire into the crowd once the drama reaches its scripted anti-religious climax, killing several people including Necip, a devout, science-fiction-obsessed teenager Ka has befriended. Pamuk collapses the distance between performance and state violence so completely that Kars's citizens spend the following days unsure whether they witnessed a play, a massacre, or a coup, which is exactly the confusion a small, isolated city offers a government that wants deniability.