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Orhan Pamuk’s Snow
BY JOHN FREEMAN
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Snow
By Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Maureen Freely. Alfred A. Knopf, 448 pages, $26.
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Taking notes
Providence writer Ann Hood was one of those bookworm kids who often had to be coaxed by her mother to "go outside and play" and who, at nine, turned to writing her own books because the local library had imposed a one-book-per-week check-out limit. In the extended Italian-American family of her maternal grandmother in West Warwick, she soaked up the stories her aunts, uncles, and cousins told to and about each other. But at school, she felt out of place, and when she told her guidance counselor in junior high that she wanted to be a writer, she was summarily dismissed. But Hood’s curiosity to see new things and to write about them never left her. After graduating with honors in English from the University of Rhode Island in 1978, she took a job as a flight attendant with TWA, where she stayed for seven and a half years. Interacting with so many people and getting a chance to see so much of the world during those years gave her the confidence to start grad school at NYU and to attend a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in ’84. There she was encouraged to shape four of her stories into the novel that became Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, which hit the bes seller lists in ’87 and was optioned for a film. At that point, Hood began to fly in a different way, turning out six more novels and a memoir (Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time) that was initiated by her father’s terminal illness. Her latest book, a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life, was published this summer, to a rave review in the Washington Post and to the excitement of her fans, especially those in Rhode Island, who eagerly await each new offering from Hood. She will do a reading and a book-signing at the Kingston Free Library (next to the URI campus) on Saturday, November 20 at 7 p.m. To reserve a free ticket, call (401) 783-8254. Hood, who teaches part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design, talks a bit about her writing in the following exchange. Q: How does a story take shape for you? A: A story usually begins with a combination of characters and a situation, though the connection between those things is not readily clear. They bump around in my mind for a long time usually. Eventually, a first sentence takes hold, and I write and rewrite that until another follows, and another, and then I’m on my way. Or the story is. Q: Are there people whom you encounter whose lives (or imagined lives) you want to capture and who become your characters? A: I am a very keen and constant observer of people, things, places. When I leave a party or gathering, I always take away something that is slightly askew. For example, I recently was at a meeting and a woman there is going through a divorce. I noticed there was an indentation on her finger where her wedding ring used to be. That is a detail I can imagine using somewhere. But I don’t write about real people, or I should say people that I know. Fiction is a lie, as Eudora Welty said. Writing about real people and events is non-fiction, and I do that in the form of essays. But fiction grows from the seed of something real, and that thing is hopefully made universal by changing and morphing it. Q: Are there themes from your own life that you want to explore through your fictional characters and their lives? A: Themes are always personal. Terry Tempest Williams says that every writer has a secret, and that they are always writing about that, just changing the props. Q: How have the losses in your own life informed these stories? A: I really don’t want to talk about my own losses. In fiction, I use the idea of loss and the movement through it to the other side all the time. That theme is what drives me and my writing. Q: What captures your heart more these days: writing or teaching? A: My heart is always with writing. It’s what I live to do. When I’m not doing it, I’m thinking about it. If circumstances keep me from writing for stretches of time, I can get very cranky. I only teach one class a semester and that’s enough. It gets me out of my little study and forces me into the world. Plus, I have amazing students there whom I get very attached to. Q: What’s your next project? Is there anything that’s gripping you and leading into your next novel? A: I am 400 pages into a novel called The Knitting Circle, about seven women who meet to knit and share their life stories. Kind of like The Joy Luck Club meets knitting. I am an obsessive knitter and am very aware of how it connects people emotionally, culturally, and traditionally. I’ve written a few non-fiction pieces about knitting and grief (for Real Simple) and knitting and relaxation (for Body and Soul). I have an urge to travel to cultures where knitting has a long tradition, such as the Aran Islands, Peru, Latvia, and other cultures. This novel uses knitting as a way to connect women of all ages and with different backgrounds. Hopefully it will be finished by the first of the year. Q: What made you choose An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life for the title of the collection? A: I read a Little Golden Book about birds and bird-watching and was struck by how similar ornithology and writing are. The skills of observation, the note-taking, the heightened awareness of surroundings, all made me think of writing. The title story is about a girl who observes her mother beginning an affair with the neighbor and I made her an amateur ornithologist to mirror that, as well as to reflect writing in general. So it seemed the perfect title for the whole collection as well. -J.R.
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Earlier this summer, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the Turkish government’s decision to ban head scarves in schools. The decision, a victory for the state, is unlikely to put an end to the controversy. One need only pick up Orhan Pamuk’s mournful new novel, Snow, to understand how divisive an issue this is in Turkey. Set between 1999 and 2001, Pamuk’s tale revolves around the suicides of three teenage Islamic girls. Islamic clerics blame the deaths on the government because it punished the girls for wearing head scarves. Secularists argue that the girls were just depressed and did what teenagers sometimes do. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle, and that’s what the novel’s protagonist, a Turkish poet named Ka, goes looking for when he travels to the remote border village of Kars. His trip echoes a journey made to Kars in 1829 by the Russian poet Pushkin, and as it turns out, Ka is as out of touch with Turks as his Russian counterpart was. He’s distracted by an unrequited crush on a woman he knows — barely — from his youth. As a former exile born to money in Istanbul, he’s also desperately aware of his outsider status in this provincial town. Reading Snow can be a disjointed experience, since your attention and Ka’s are so often at odds. As feelings ratchet upward toward a revolution, Ka drifts through town in a somnolent haze, dazzled by a heavy snowstorm. As the flakes drift down, muffling gunshots across town, Ka wanders into tearooms to jot down poems before they dissolve like snowflakes on his jacket sleeve. Maintaining distance is his forte. He witnesses the assassination of a government minister and the death of a sweet young radical. Neither stops him from writing his poetry. Ka doesn’t remain entirely disengaged, however. In fact, watching this gentle (if self-absorbed) artist get involved is one of the book’s great dramas. Knowing that he must maintain at least the pretense of journalism to remain in Kars, he interviews the families of the head-scarf girls, as they are called. He talks to the boys who became infatuated with them, and the Islamic leaders inflamed by their deaths. With the help of a philosophical young boy, he visits a dashingly mysterious Islamic fundamentalist named Blue. Like many other characters in this book, Blue wants there to be an Islamic Turkey — and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Snow is a talky book, and the sections in which Ka interviews radicals are its most loquacious. Pamuk’s characters do not so much state opinions as tell stories. These strange, slightly skewed tales proliferate in Snow and then nest in one another like Russian matryoshka dolls. The book has two climaxes; both take place at theaters during the production of political plays. Like the country it unfolds in, Snow is full of competing narratives — stories of sacrifice, martyrdom, and revenge. You carom off into one of these alternate story lines for five to eight pages only to return — like someone stepping foggily from a time machine — to the central story of Ka’s transforming consciousness. And then there’s the snow, which keeps drifting down, conjuring up his childhood memories. This is Pamuk’s fifth book to be translated into English, and it is also his fifth translator. Maureen Freely seems to have spun the finest weave from his prose, and that is important in a book that so frequently takes a break from the action to describe the melancholy of falling snow. Alternating between the snowstorm’s hush and the philosophical conversations, which are reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, Snow proves a gripping read. And a timely one too. Pamuk has claimed in interviews that he is not a political writer, but he will have difficulty defending that position with Snow, which dramatizes many of the issues facing the Middle East today. To a certain degree, the book dramatizes his own situation. Its underlying drama of a writer struggling to remain apolitical is all but occluded by the blizzard of various "topical" narratives. To non-Turks, Pamuk’s books are a window into Turkish culture. It would be nice to have the pleasure of reading Snow not simply as the political novel it is but as a work of art. But then one is drawn back to one of Pamuk’s epigraphs, from Stendhal: "Politics in a literary work are a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore." Orhan Pamuk reads this Tuesday, October 12, at 5 p.m. in the Malkin Penthouse of the Littauer Building at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 79 JFK Street in Harvard Square. The reading is free and open to the public; call (617) 661-1515.
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