Dance Me To The End Of Love, Turkish Edition

Snow by Orhan Pamuk is an invocation for life, love, art, beauty, family, friends and connections against a panoply of competing factions thirsting for power, imposing their rules and ambitions over traditions of the past, and the meat grinder such sociopolitical forces become, sucking lives into its vortex, hungry to neutralize all perceived as threats. 

The main character is Turkish poet, Ka, who after 12 years exiled in Germany, returns to Kars, Turkey, the town of his youth. He is now on a pilgrimage of sorts during tumultuous times (a local rebellion between radical Islam and western secular ideals). He has had writer’s block, unable to create poetry for some time, and arrives in Kars hoping to reignite a past unrequited love since learning this previous object of desire has recently divorced. He aches for love and to write poems again. The whole book transpires primarily during his three day visit to Kars, although in reading, it feels like a lifetime because so much happens.

The book deals with many aspects of community life in Kars during the early 90s as rebellion foments during a spate of Muslim schoolgirl suicides. Love is sought and found, lives are lost, a controversial play is performed, poetry is created, and pathos is around every corner. The book consists of character studies that drive the plot, wrapped in a narrative. By the last third of the book I was engulfed in an oppressive, overwhelming sense of sadness, and the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s song “Dance Me to the End of Love” haunted me. 

Writer Margaret Atwood said of Snow’s author "Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth. Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience at a particular place, in a particular time.” In one sense Pamuk makes us feel the truth in a way statistics are incapable of doing. A page full of data requires interpretation, while his literary gifts take aim at the political, ideological, social, and artistic culture conveying them to readers through his characters working out their personal struggles within that context. 

A local news story about Muslim girls being urged to remove their hijabs, and later killing themselves can grab the world’s attention, not the kind of focus town authoritarians welcome. The local story of the Muslim girls becomes a faded backdrop for the narrative’s actual focus: will a planned play create a riot if a hijab is removed or someone gets shot or hanged? What ideology will prevail in local politics: Islamists, military, or the independent secularists? Will the snow stop so roads can be cleared and stranded town leaders return? Will the lovers leave to start a life in Germany? 

Kars is engulfed in a heavy snowstorm temporarily cutting them off from the rest of the world. The snow is insulating and quiet, peaceful and beautiful, a contrast with the sturm und drang of political and interpersonal mind games. Pamuk writes,“Ka marveled at the snow-laden branches of the oleanders and the plane trees, at the icicles hanging down from the sides of the electric poles feeding the pale orange light of the streetlamps, and the dying neon bulbs behind the icy shop windows. The snow was falling into a magical, almost holy silence, and aside from his own almost silent footsteps and rapid breathing, Ka could hear nothing. Not a single dog was barking.” Another character reflects, “The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.” 

During much of the book, Ka’s beautiful love interest is a healing blanket he covers himself with during his stay, fending off reality and time. He sees her as his muse priming his internal pump for poetic beauty, and dreams of their future together. Human nature, his own immature heart, wrongful assumptions, and political expediences all conspire against them. Almost supernaturally during his three day visit, while immersed in his own cultural milieu with the woman of his dreams, he writes 19 poems.

Near the book’s end the narrator meets an acquaintance at the shuttered dormitory of a religious high school and they have an exchange, “‘Doesn’t all this make you afraid of turning into an atheist so gradually you don’t even notice, like the man in the story?’ His friend comments,‘I’m a married man now; I have a child,’ he said. ‘I’m no longer interested in such matters.’” Things that seemed so important in a youthful past fall away when one is raising the next generation. Time and life march forward.

In 2006 Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his powerful lecture entitled “My Father’s Suitcase” he talks about the process of writing, “It isn’t enough even to be a poet…to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them…if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand…all true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other.” 

The novel Snow is a virtual pageant play of characters’ hopes, dreams, and fears to which  people of all ethnic backgrounds can relate. Pamuk makes his points so powerfully, readers don’t merely see and understand, they feel the heights and depths these lives go through. We come away with an understanding of the factions making up Turkey’s late 20th century population, how it feels to be caught in the middle, the kind of difficult, often spur of the moment decisions that must be made, and how that impacts lives. Readers feel for the characters, and recognize themselves in some. In Leonard Cohen’s ballad “Dance Me to the End of Love” a singer wails, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,  Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in, Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove, Dance me to the end of love, Dance me to the end of love.” It is the dance of life, making connections in the safe haven love offers, raising families, and a wish for the permanence of holding hands until the end. Pamuk, like an ancient snake charmer swaying with his flute like pungi, beckons us to listen to his literary music, and follow in his dance. It is an offer impossible to refuse.