Two ideas usually hover closely around Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name is Red, Snow, and, most recently, Istanbul, a memoir. The first is the Nobel Prize, which he will doubtlessly garner for the second idea, namely that his fiction is undeniably "prescient." In a reversal of art imitating life that plays darkly upon this prescience, Pamuk has been charged with insulting Turkish national identity—a transgression that extremist characters pin on Ka, the protagonist of Snow—and faces up to three years in prison.

When considering the nature of these charges in light of Snow (written pre- and post-9/11 and published in Turkey in 2002, in the U.S. last year, and in paperback this summer), Pamuk's ability to write politically-charged narrative whose themes haunt, and will indefinitely plague, the globe is rendered all the more terrifyingly sublime. The east versus the west, radical Islam versus right-wing republican governments, belief in God versus secular atheism, poverty versus so-called enlightenment, and national sovereignty versus freedom of speech are a handful of dueling variegations in the novel, in which Pamuk himself appears as a character. In certain ways, this Orhan, revealed halfway through as the appearing and disappearing first-person guide, will also be put on trial on December 16.

In an interview conducted with the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger last February, Pamuk said, "Thirty-thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it." One almost senses that the last part of Pamuk's statement pissed off the country's powers-that-be to condemn its greatest writer and call him, in the language of Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code, "a person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly" as much as the utterance of figures and blame. Nobody but me dares to talk about it practically explodes with an angry insistence rendered all the more startling for its simplicity and self emphasis—a shout issued to measure the magnitude of silence, a wake-up call whose gravity transcends self-importance and haughtiness. Yet it is for these qualities that Pamuk is regarded, and may be punished, by Turkey as a national heretic.

Turkey does not deny the deaths of thousands of Armenians during World War I. It asserts, however, that the number killed in what is commonly known as the Armenian Genocide is grossly inflated and does not warrant the damning genocide label, despite indictments from Armenia and European countries that Ottoman forces systematically put to death the Armenians living in the then Ottoman Empire.

Pamuk's reference to 30,000 Kurdish deaths concerns those killed since 1984 in the complicated conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists whose main rebel terrorist group is the Kurdistan Workers' Party or P.K.K. The rebels called a ceasefire in 1999 even though fighting has persisted, not surprisingly. Dialogues on Kurdish issues and the Armenian death toll have been largely repressed because of inflexible laws whose transgression involve interminable lawsuits, fines, and prison sentences as penalties.

Pamuk's remarks and trial come when Turkey has been conducting serious introspection in order to win membership to the European Union. Reforms to its penal code, extending rights to Kurds and their language, and improving its human rights record by implementing appropriate legislation have all been part and parcel of Turkey transforming its image into a flexible, liberal, and secular country. Clearly, as Pamuk has reminded us, there is much more work required for it to be recognized as a player for humanism when it can hardly acknowledge, much less thoughtfully address, the Armenian massacre, and to be recognized as an arbiter of free speech when the governor of Pamuk's home province ordered the author's books to be burned—the very fiction that has almost single-handedly lifted the veil on the culture, history, and social texture of today's Turkey.

Reportedly, it is Turgay Evsen who filed the charges against Pamuk. Evsen brought similar charges against Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrank Dink and is seen in various leftist circles as a prosecutor attempting to make a name for himself through nationalist showboating. Given the crucial timing of the trial, Turkey's diplomatic contingent and friends could not be in favor of Pamuk's prosecution, but, considering the internal sway of the country's powerful nationalist right-wing factions, saying that the situation is delicate or even thorny puts the situation mildly.

Indeed, much of Snow concerns the Islamic backlash to Turkey's drive to reconcile its way of life with that of contemporary Europe and the West at large—a layered issue in most nations with a Muslim majority and extremist strains. Reconciliation issues, of course, have been faced by all European nations in the past decade as the EU has leveled and united the economic playing fields of vastly idiomatic cultures. For Turkey, however, the question has a near-schizophrenic complexity given its competing internal ideologies, ethnicities, and histories at odds with one another, not to mention that it regards itself, and has been regarded for years as, Europe's Other. Thus, at the heart of this struggle lies not so much a threat to the loss of character but a sometime brutal search for what characteristics establish Turkish identity and who gets to determine for the record what those may be.

The political novel in capital-L Literature is out of fashion due to a general wariness of aesthetic soapboxes, but in many ways Snow heralds its necessary return when the world's political actions and reactions impinge on everyday existence more and more. The book is mind-expanding, for example, in its ability to plumb the fundamentalist Islamic mind, showing how religion is an incendiary pretext for economic and ideological struggles—a point not often made so clearly in a range of media outlets.

On its cool surface, Snow traces the journey of Ka, a Turkish poet in exile (whose name recalls Kafka and The Trial's K. with good reason), who travels to the isolated city of Kars to investigate a rash of suicides by Muslim girls and to reunite with his lost love, Ipek, only to get swept up in a blizzard of politics between the pseudo-totalitarian republican government and Islamic fundamentalists. Pamuk resuscitates the political novel by transcending the layers of political examination with an ongoing meditation on happiness and art. It is a great mediation of sorts, which, as it turns out, is Ka's main action in the novel. Given his national, if controversial, writerly stature, he attempts the impossible task of courting both sides of the battle, and negotiating the flawed, self-protecting, and treacherous personalities in every camp in between, in the hopes of safely delivering himself, Ipek, and her family out of the fray.

The book is still much more than these intrigues and, despite its bleak-sounding premise, combines tropes from farcical comedy and the harrowing love story. Despite the tenuous nature of his many pursuits, he is fiercely immersed in the world, actively observing how the city and people are reduced to their essences by the constant snow. He often stops by a teahouse when trekking to a covert meeting to write a poem because, when it arrives like a snippet of music, the poem must be transmitted to page instantly or lost forever. And just as a poem revolves around an unknown, missing center (it is revealed that all of Ka's poems written in Kars go literally missing and are ultimately unknown), it is Kars' Armenian populace that is the missing space in Snow.

The Armenian Genocide is referenced several times, directly and indirectly. Ka trudges through snowdrifts by old homes and shops that had belonged to Armenians long since gone. A detective questions Orhan if he is in town snooping about an affair known as "the Armenian thing." When representatives from Kars' multitude of political views gather to sign a document about the military's staged coup and its ensuing aftermath, the lack of Armenian voice becomes noticeable because of the very impossibility of having one. The Armenian absence and silence, like the omnipresent snow, like the hollows within the lines of a snowflake, permeate the novel.

For reasons that would spoil the book, Orhan assembles his friend Ka's activities, thoughts, justifications, and poem ideas from notes and sources to tell the true story of what happened during Kars' political upheaval when the city was made impassable by snow. It is this idea of constructing a history for the record, insofar as possible, out of a need for understanding all sides that gives Orhan an empathetic yet journalistic authority. Subsequently, the novel feels all the more real for being once removed from the public and private events that it details and approximates, which, like the people, cannot truly be understood by outsiders. It is the history that transpires beneath the surface, when no one is looking, or no one can see, that exerts itself on the larger scale in due time.

Since Snow is offered as a record-setting tale of fictional events in a place that is haunted by the massacre of a minority populace, would not Orhan the narrator also be on trial? Is Pamuk being indirectly persecuted for highlighting such truths, and, more specifically, the whitewashing of truths, in his fiction? The answers will come in December.





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