Orhan Pamuk: A wintry tale from Turkey

The highly regarded Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk broadened his UK readership considerably when his novel My Name Is Red, a tale of a murder in 16th-century Istanbul, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary prize in 2003.

His new book, Snow, has a contemporary setting, taking place in Kars, a remote provincial town in the north-east of Turkey. A Turkish poet living in exile in Germany makes a visit to Kars, made notorious by a string of suicides among its young women. In a town fast becoming cut off by the winter snows, the poet gets increasingly embroiled among people caught between the rising force of political Islam on one side and the brutal oppression of the Turkish police on the other.

"Although Snow seems to be immersed in local politics, in fact what Turkey has been experiencing as local politics for years is turning out to be international politics now. It is the conflict between modernity and tradition, or journalistically speaking between East and West, or the West and Islam. Turkey has been dealing with this problem privately, in a silent way, for 200 years; now it is all over the world. September 11th came just as I was finishing the book.

"To write Snow I went to the town of Kars and lived there for a while. I had been there once before in the early 1970s when I was an upper-middle-class boy from Istanbul curious to know what the poorer areas of my country were like. I was very impressed with Kars then, because it was a beautiful town, really poetic.

"Recently there was a chain of suicides among young women in a town very close to Kars; the men who bombed the British consulate in Istanbul also came from these very poor eastern Anatolian towns.

"I was of course a foreigner for the inhabitants of Kars, just like my character, the poet. 'Why are you coming here? You are a spy.' I was afraid to go there before getting in touch with the local police because, although this may seem like a free country, if you want to go there as a Turkish citizen, not a tourist, they are always suspicious. The police followed me step by step wherever I went, just like my character.

"The book implies that political Islam should be understood not as something entirely related to religion or any sacred text, but to the poor and dispossessed. Besides their miserable life conditions, the fact that the signs and symbols of western culture are everywhere in abundance makes the situation more humiliating and fuels all sorts of nationalism and religious fury. There is sometimes a cruel irony and humour in the book--that was the only way to achieve a distance about the wretchedness I saw.

"If I had been an unknown journalist in Kars and printed this book without an international reputation, I would definitely be in trouble. I use my reputation as protection. Snow upset both the Islamists and the seculars: the seculars because I showed that Turkey is depending too much on the military, and the Islamists because they didn't like the fact that I describe an Islamist having affairs with women without marrying them. 'This cannot be true!'"

* Orhan Pamuk Snow (Faber, 1st April, h/b, £16.99, 057121830X)