A great story of an elusive love and heartbreak against a political backdrop in modern day Turkey by the great story teller. An exiled poet Ka returns back to his hometown of Kars to investigate the suicide by young girls forbidden to wear head scrafs. He accepted the assignment drawn by a misplaced hope of winning over Ipek his long lost love who is now recently dovorced.
The backdrop of the story is constant snowfall which prompts the poet to write poems tagging to the different corners of a snowflake. When poems come to him, he would find a lonely corner to write it into a blue book which was eventually lost after he was murdered back in Germany. The story shows the dillemma the dogmatic rules of religion causes in the society which longs for freedom. In the story poet crosses his path with number of interesting characters including charismatic Blue, an Islamic terrorist wanted to crush any retort to religious dogmas, Ipek and her sister, Ipek’s ex-husband, a modernist turned Islamist. Overall book shows how religion would ultimately uproot the secular credentials of any society and turn it into a burning hell where radicals would always be at loggerheads with moderates.
In particular the book highlights the challenge Islam in particular has where it’s rigid dogma causes a constant anxiety among its followers always questioning their belief to the core tenets of religion. The whole society is ultimately driven to madness to prove that they are true to Islam and not hypocrites which are destined to rot in the worst of hell. That madness is metaphorically depicted by the author in the massacre at the theater which killed his only hope to secure his happiness.
Ka is driven by a lingering hope to get Ipek back with him to Germany which was an elusive happy paradise he has been searching all his life. Ipek gave hope but retraced her steps at the last moment breaking Ka and ultimately led to his murder.
In Snow, Orhan tries to unravel the conflict in modern Turkey between modernity and fundamentalist Islam which is reflective of the struggle in every Islamic society at present. It’s an important book to understand the challenges Islamic societies face today and readers will get more insights into that inner struggle in these societies than they would ever get by reading history books or any other non-fiction commentary.
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