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

are still on view in Kars—in particular the Armenian houses and churches and schools whose ghostly reminder of a scattered and desecrated civilization is enhanced in its eeriness by the veil of snow. Nor does he omit the sullen and disaffected Kurdish population. The price of Kemalism was the imposition of a uniform national identity on Turkey, where ethnic and religious variety was heavily repressed, and where the standard-issue unsmiling bust of Atatürk—pervasive in Pamuk’s account of the scenery and most often described as the target of terrorism or vandalism—became the symbol of military rule. (Atatürk was a lifelong admirer of the French Revolution, but Turkey, as was once said of Prussia, is not so much a country that has an army as an army that has a country.) In these circumstances it takes a certain amount of courage for any Turkish citizen to challenge the authorized version of modern statehood.
    However, courage is an element that this novel lacks. Some important Turkish scholarship has recently attempted an honest admission of the Armenian genocide and a critique of the official rationalizations for it. The principal author in this respect is Taner Akçam, who, as Pamuk is certainly aware, was initially forced to publish his findings as one of those despised leftist exiles in Germany—whereas from reading Snow one might easily conclude that all the Armenians of Anatolia had decided for some reason to pick up and depart en masse, leaving their ancestral properties for tourists to gawk at. As for the Kurds, Pamuk tends to represent them as rather primitive objects of sympathy.
    Ka’s poetic rebirth involves him, and us, in a comparable fatalism and passivity. Early in the story he is quite baldly described as feeling a predetermined poem coming on, and is prevented from completion of the closing lines only by a sudden knock at the door. I managedto assimilate the implied allusion to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” But about fifty pages later, when another poem was successfully delivered from Ka’s subconscious, I was confronted with a full-out deadpan account of the person from Porlock who had interrupted Coleridge at the critical moment. Pamuk’s literalism and pedantry are probably his greatest enemies as a writer of fiction; he doesn’t trust the reader until he has hit him over the head with dialogue and explanation of the most didactic kind. Throughout the remainder of the novel, though, we are invited to believe in the miraculous rather than the mundane: Ka quite simply sits himself down at odd moments and sets out near faultless poems (never quoted) on whatever paper is handy. The necessary cliché about “automatic writing” is eventually employed, somewhat heavily, to account for this. But I was inevitably put in mind of the Koran, or “recitation,” by which the Prophet Muhammad came to be the supposed medium of the divine.
    Ka is presented to us as a man who has assumed or affected his atheism as a kind of protective epidermis. His unbelief is of a piece with his attempt to deaden his emotions and decrease his vulnerability. His psyche is on a knife edge, and he is always ready to be overwhelmed by the last person he has spoken to. Yet he can watch an educator being shot in cold blood by a Muslim zealot and feel nothing. Only when in the company of beaming Dervishes and Sufis—those Islamic sects that survived Atatürk’s dissolution of clerical power—does he become moist and trusting and openhearted. Yet “rising up inside him was that feeling he had always known as a child and as a young man at moments of extraordinary happiness: a prospect of future misery and hopelessness.” Like the Danish prince who had a version of the same difficulty, Ka finds a form of cathartic relief in helping to produce the violent stage play that expresses his own fears and dreads. Pamuk drops in many loud references to Chekhov,