And Yet... by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online

and the claims of competing nationalist minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town, and it enacts a “play within a play,” in which the bitter violence of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to alternate between visions of “snow” in its macrocosmic form—the chilly and hostile masses—and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.
    In terms of characterization the novel is disappointing, precisely because its figures lack the crystalline integrity of individuals. Ipek, for example, appears on almost every page yet is barely allowed anyquality other than her allegedly wondrous beauty. The protagonists speak their lines as Islamists, secularists, conformists, and opportunists. And the author leaves no room for doubt that he finds the Islamists the most persuasive and courageous. This is true in spite of the utter nonsense that he makes them spout. A couple of Muslim boys corner Ka and demand that he answer this question, about a dead girl he never met:
    Now we’d like to know if you could do us both a favor. The thing is, we can both accept that Teslime might have been driven to the sin of suicide by the pressures from her parents and the state. It’s very painful; Fazil can’t stop thinking that the girl he loved committed the sin of suicide. But if Teslime was a secret atheist like the one in the story, if she was one of those unlucky souls who don’t even know that they are atheists, or if she committed suicide because she was an atheist, for Fazil this is a catastrophe: It means he was in love with an atheist.
    I should caution the potential reader that a great deal of the dialogue is as lengthy and stilted as that, even if in this instance the self-imposed predicaments of the pious, along with their awful self-pitying solipsism, are captured fairly well. So is the superiority/inferiority complex of many provincial Turks—almost masochistic when it comes to detailing their own woes, yet intensely resentful of any “outside” sympathy. Most faithfully rendered, however, is the pervading sense that secularism has been, or is being, rapidly nullified by diminishing returns. The acting troupe is run by a vain old Kemalist mountebank named Sunay Zaim, who once fancied himself an Atatürk look-alike, and his equally decrepit and posturing lady friend. The army and the police use torture as a matter of course to hang on to power. Their few civilian supporters are represented as diseased old ex-Stalinists whose leader—one Z. Demirkol, not further named—could have leapt from the pages of Soviet agitprop. These forces take advantage of the snowstorm to mount a coup in Kars and impose their own arbitrarywill, though it is never explained why they do this or how they can hope to get away with it.
    In contrast, the Muslim fanatics are generally presented in a favorable or lenient light. A shadowy “insurgent” leader, incongruously named Blue, is a man of bravery and charm, who may or may not have played a heroic role in the fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. (Among these and many other contemporary references, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are never mentioned.) The girls who immolate themselves for the right to wear head-covering are shown as if they had been pushed by the pitiless state, or by their gruesome menfolk, to the limits of endurance. They are, in other words, veiled quasi-feminists. The militant boys of their age are tormented souls seeking the good life in the spiritual sense. The Islamist ranks have their share of fools and knaves, but these tend to be ex-leftists who