He arrives on the last bus before a snowstorm cuts off the city from the rest of the country, leaving events to unfold without outside intervention. When Ka learned that Ipek, a woman with whom he had been in love with, is now in Kars and separated from her husband, he agrees to go. The editor wanted someone to go to Kars to report on the municipal elections and, more particularly, the recent spate of suicides by young women. He has briefly returned to Turkey where he met an old friend, a newspaper editor. The hero is Ka (the initials of his name), a poet who has lived in exile in Germany for political reasons.

The story is told by Orhan Pamuk who is both narrator but also, at the end, a character, as he goes to Kars to gather information about the events in the novel, which he will then turn into the novel we are reading. Indeed, it even snows in the small part of the novel set in Germany. And, during most of the novel, it snows, cutting off the city of Kars from the rest of Turkey. The hero is called Ka, similar in sound to kar, the Turkish for snow. The story is set in Kars, whose name means snow. What could be better than a post-modernist sad love story which bravely confronts the issues of Islamic fundamentalism, Western influence and the role of women in modern Turkey? Once again Pamuk produces a masterpiece and one that probably led to his getting the Nobel Prize and, frankly, this is one of the occasions when the Nobel Prize Committee actually got it right.Īs the title implies, snow is key here and, no, not as a name for heroin.

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