According to the latest Google entry, the killer of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink has been caught in Samsun on the Black Sea. He is a 17-year old unemployed young man from a religious school - how eerily similar to details in our book ! The young man's home town is from Trabzon.

Dink was "controversial" because he pointed out that the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 was indeed genocide, a fact the state adamantly refuses to admit. The state considers the accusation an attack against Turkishness.

I found a map of Turkey, it shows the location of Istanbul, Ankara and even Kars. Neither Samsun nor Trabzon are shown.

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/middle_east/turkey/turkey.htm

The Monetary Reform was the beginning, and the Marshall Plan brought Germany back to her feet. In the mid-fifties began a period of reconstruction so all-encompassing that it was called "the German Economic Miracle".

Thousands and thousands of people were needed to implement the plans, and thus began a "guest worker" (Gastarbeiter) program that brought foreign workers into West Germany en masse on a contractual basis: Yugoslavs Greeks, Spaniards and, in the early sixties, came the Turks who in 1961 were allowed to leave Turkey for the first time.

Turkish men only came first, in subsequent years families followed. Mosques were built. The Germans did nothing by half measure (!).

When I visited during those years I saw how the atmosphere in the large cities changed progressively. Everyone hurried and was pursuing money and a better life. To see and sit close to Turkish women in the street car surprised me at first. They all wore long coats even in the heat of summer, mostly brown, and a kerchief that hid every hair on their heads. Some had beautiful faces; most were young. All averted their eyes; I never saw one smile. When families were out together, the father walked in front, the wife and childre followed several paces behind.

But aside from economic considerations the Germans realized that they would never live down the horrors of the Holocaust; indeed it has been conjectured that, in order to atone, Germany developed the most liberal asylum policy in all of Europe. Thousands of asylum seekers found their way to Germany from Sri Lanka, diverse other hot spots in the world and various parts of Africa. All were/are let in, all asking for asylum for political reasons.

Such a person must register. It takes time to check the validity of the claim. But from the time of registration, the asylym seeker is given a subsidy on which to live. That was true for Ka, as we will see in the book.

Today some 2.6 million Turks live in Germany. Many thought they would stay no longer than 10 to 15 years but are still there. There are many Turkish associations, circles and Turkish-owned businesses that allow for a socially separate existence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1627912.stm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bey

http://www.turkeyforyou.com/travel_turkey_batman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Ataturk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Eugene_of_Savoy

Ka considers himself a "moralist" (page 23); he is also a rather self-absorbed dreamer, perhaps a Romantic at heart.
He is ambivalent about Frankfurt where he found asylum and receives a modest stipend but has never been truly happy. He loves the libraries and spent a lot of time there, but he refuses to learn German, which is alien to him (of course).

But it is hard to see how, in actual practice, he like other asylants could possibly fail to eventually decipher nolens volens sign posts, street names, the itineraries of trains and buses, or learn to utter "please" and "thank you".

In Istanbul Kadife had failed her finals in the fist year but managed to tranfer to the Institute of Education in Kars.
After the death in a car accident of Ipek's and Kadife's mother, the father didn't want to stay there alone,
He and Kadife joined Ipek and her husband in Kars.
No sooner had they arrived that Ipek's marriage, which was childless, fell apart.
Turgut Bey and his daughters occupy three rooms in the hotel they own with some relatives, "and it's full of ghosts and tormented dead suls." (pg. 34, bottom)

Chapter Five deserves special attention, I believe. This is the conflict in a nutshell :
- Director : "We live in a secular state. It's the secular state that has banned covered girls, both in schools and classrooms."

The struggle in Turkey is between the secular and the religious forces, it is bitter and it is violent, as recent history shows.

The Armenian Massacre is a different issue. It took place in 1915 during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. (See details in links below.) Today, the Republic of Turkey denies that the massacare was genocide and considers any assertion to that effect a grave, criminal offense against Turkishness.

Pamuk committed that very offense by referring to the killings as genocide in an interview with a Swiss paper in 2005, I think. He was going to be prosecuted for it at home, but an international outcry arose. Turkey was pointedly reminded that if it hoped to be admitted to the EU it had to grant its own citizens their civil rights - sooner rather than later.

HATS, I don't think Ka was a nihilist. He is struggling about his faith, or lack thereof, as we can see. Nihilists have no such doubts. They believe literally in nothing. (How sad!)

BTW, I checked on raki , the drink of choice for the characters in the book. It is a brandy popular in Turkey and the Balkans, distilled with grapes or plums and flavored with anise.

The term "lycée" is French and defines a school between elementary and college. It is not clear to me from the book whether the religious schools in Kars or elsewhere in Turkey were also called 'lycées', or whether they were coeducational. (Probably not.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

"And because I live in a democacy, becaue I happen to be a free man who can do as he pleases, I sometimes end up getting on a bus and traveling to the oher end of Turkey to track down the perpetrator (of an injustice) and have it out with him face to face."

He twists every sentence, brushes aside any logical reply and gets increasingly agitated while waving the gun around. His accusations and name-calling become ever more strident. He says "Once I blow my fuse, it's all over." and casually mentions that he has been in prison "and made men of all of them (the other prisoners) in there." Not only a murderer but a sadist, too.

The use of "tiny" is a little puzzling. We don't know whether Pamuk meant to describe the murderer this way (possibly dwarf-like), or whether the translator made that choice. The term is used also in Chapter Six.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammam

"What sorts of sounds?" (Muhtar asks)

""It may have to do with fear of getting old and dying," Ka said, with embrrassment. "If I were an author and Ka were a character in a book, I'd say 'Snow reminds me of God!' "But I'm not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow."

Careful reading of this book is essential lest we miss a connection or don't "get" Pamuk's irony: At the beginning of Chapter Seven when Ka fills Muhtar in on other Turks both have known who went to Germany, in the last full paragraph on pg. 59, there is mention of the PKK, an armed militant group.

"Of all the political exiles Ka had met in Germany, the happiest was Ferhat, who had joined the PKK and was now attacking various offices of Turkish Airlines with revolutionary fervor; he'd also been seen on CNN, throwing Molotov cocktails at Turkish consulates; apparently he was not learning Kurdish and dreaming of a second career as a Kurdish poet."

(Reading that made me think of Martha Mitchell, the wife of the Atttorney General under Nixon, who was implicated in the Watergate coverup. Martha Mitchell would call news channels late at night with rambling, cryptic semi-revelations. It is not a good comparison, of course, because she was not personally dangerous, like Blue.)

Ka hates Blue (pg. 74) and I don't think we have to fear that he'll fall for Blue's schemes.

It is interesting that Blue had also lived in Germany for a while but did not stay. In talking about this with Ka, Blue expresses the very same (almost pathological) feeling of inferiority toward Germans, like Ka himself, and Muhtar. Look at this paragraph on page 73

When I was in Germany, at whatever Muslim association I happened to be visiting, in whatever city - it could be Frankfurt or Cologne, somewhere between the cathedral and the station, or one of the wealthy neighborhoods of Hamburg - wherever I happened to be walking, there was always one German who stood out of the crowd as an object of fascinaton for me. The important thing was not what I thought about him ; I'd try to see myself in his eyes and imagine what he might be thinking about my apperance, my clothes, the way I moved, my history, where I had just been and where I was going, who I was. It made me feel terrible, but it became a habit. I became used to feeling degraded (!!) and I could understand how my brothers felt. ... Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. (!) When we undertake the pilgrimage (!?), it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. (Souls and purity?) The day arrives when the guilty (?) must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave. Why did you come back ?" (emphasis and parenthetical additions mine)

Regarding your question : I think the paragraph in parentheses in the middle of pg. 70 is a bit of a teaser. I did NOT turn to Chapter Thirty-Five; I didn't want to break (or miss any of) the chronological developments of the story. I'm re-reading now. One chapter at a time, as JONATHAN suggested.

Hello, MAHLIA, and welcome ! We have benefited before from your thorough knowledge of Islam, e.g. in August of 2003 in the dicussion of Queen Noor's "Leap of Faith : Memoirs of an Unexpected Life", and in June of 2004 in the dicussion of "Islamic Threat : Myth or Reality", by John Esposito.

The subject of Islam has fascinated me early on, and I chose it for my thesis - over the initial objections of my faculty adviser, who was ultimately very complimetary of it.

Excellent questions, both. Thank you, JUDY and JONATHAN.
So far = by Chapter Nine and Chapter Ten, we see Ka as more ardent, more eager, increasingly impatient. But is Ka's desperate longing for Ipek love ? How long has he been in Kars ? Two days, three ?

Ipek on the other hand is cautious and more circumspect. At this point in the story we can only speculate what may be in store for them since we are taking the story one chapter at a time. Some readers may have their suspicions, but so far there is no basis in fact.

When Ka leaves Blue's hideout, "it wasn't danger Ka sensed but rather the fact of not belonging here ."
We don't know what is meant by "here" : the now empty hideout, or Kars as a whole. The meeting with Blue had lasted only twenty minutes. (Paragraphs 2 and 3, Chapter Nine, pg. 80)

A black stray dog follows Ka into the railroad station, a "dirty, empty building", where Necif, Fazil and Mesur, the three religious students, teenagers all, eengage him in a heated debate about his beliefs (in God) and opinion (about suicide). Another story, which Ka remembers having heard from Turks in Germany, is recounted in the manner of a parable, ending with an implied message for those who lose their "pure and innocent heart" and stray from the straight and narrow.

It was not light reading. It was not easy reading. It was essential reading.

Since Ka shares only the titles of his poems, not the poems themselves, we have no idea what "symmetries" are meant.

In Chapter Eleven we see him running first into a teahouse, ostensibly to ask for directions to the sheikh's house. There he downs three glasses of raki as if they were water. By the time he arrives at the sheikh'shouse, he is drunk.

It is interesting that the sheikh does not scold Ka's for his impaired state. Can we assume then that the attitude of the Islamic clergy in Turkey is considerably less stringent than it is in Saudi Arabia, for exmple, where people can be jailed for possession of alcohol ?

Like Egypt, Turkey has a secular government. We gather from our book that the religious students in their "lycée" in Turkey learn about the Islamic faith in greater depth than younger children do in state schools. Ka has long forgotten the prayers he learned as a child when the maid took him to the mosque for what was apparently very basic instruction. The maids visited with each other, and the children rolled around on the carpet afterwards.

The sheikh invites Ka to sit next to him on the divan and gives him his undivided attention. The alcohol has loosened Ka's tongue and he says something quite extraordinary (in the third full paragraph from the bottom on pg. 97)

"I feel guilty about having refused all my life to believe in the same God as the uneducated - the aunties with their heads wrapped in scarves, the uncles with the prayer beads in their hands. There is a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in God. ..." (emphasis mine)

When Ka leaves the sheikh's lodge, he wanders about for a while and then, feeling another poem coming, drops in the first teahouse he comes across to write it down. But no poem comes this time. The place is packed and soon the inquisitive Necip approaches Ka to ask him one last question about God's existence.

Ka says, "God exists. So does heaven".
Necip replies, "No, you're just saying that to console me, because you feel sorry for me. As soon as you're back in Germany, you'll start thinking God doesn't exist, just like you did before."

Actually there is more to Ms. Hirsi's story than what is stated in the link. But in the interest of not losing valuable time for the discussion of our current book I would rather not comment on Ms. Hirsi further at this time.

My point about Ka was his own admission that he felt guilty of refusing all his life to believe in the same God as the UNEDUCATED . The keyword is "uneducated", which is dismissive. Since Ka (and by extension Pamuk) provide no further explanation, readers can only speculate.

But what is the reader to make of discrepancies in information given ? Example:
In the sheikh's home Ka listens also to other men.
"There have been a few more suicides," the short man said, "but the state has decided not to tell us, for the same reason as when it decides not to tell us that the temperature is dropping - they don't want to upset us." (pg. 99)

In Chapter Thirteen Ka reports at length on his conversation with Kadife. "First, to Ka's surprise, they discussed meteorology."
Kadife knows all about the subject and goes into detail about the provenance of low pressure and how many centimeters of snow had fallen in Samkanus,and that the inhabitants of Kars no longer believed the weather report.

Hirsi did board a plane in Kenya in 1992 to visit family in Düsseldorf and Berlin, the family said. She did get off in Düseldorf, stayed for a few days, then went on to the Netherlands.

Parliament was locked in debate whether or not to revoke her citizenship. Hirsi resigned her government position. When all was said and done, she was allowed to keep her Dutch passport and her alien (green) I.D. card. She is now in the States, associated with the American Enterprise Institute.

In many cases it takes the authorities years to gather information on an asylum seeker's background and the validity of his/her request for asylum. Language difficulties can slow the process further. Ms. Hirsi's request was granted within three weeks. She was fortunate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

"At times like these he had felt most guilty; all he wanted was to forget about Turkey and everything in it and go home and read a book." Home.
Is Frankfurt his home ?

"... what a fool he had been to leave Istanbul for Kars in the first place, and then he concluded that it had been a mistake even to leave Germany and return to Turkey. He thought of his mother (!), who had so wanted him to have a normal life" (How is a poet's life not normal ?) "and tried so hard to keep him away from poetry and literasture; if she could have known his happiness depended on a woman from Kars who helped out in the kitchen and cut bread in thick slices, what would she have said?" (What indeed. Disapproved?) "What would his father have said to learn that Ka had knelt before a village sheikh and talked with tears in his eyes about his faith in God?"

"One of its (the poem's) important ideas was the poet's ability to shut off part of his mind even while the world was in turmoil." (emphasis mine)

"Ka saw two men about his age, coming rushing out of a shoemaker's shop; one was rather large, the other slim as a child. Twice a week for the past twelve years, each of these two lovers had been telling his wife that he was going to stop at the coffeehouse, and they would then meet secretly in the shop that stank of glue; but hearing on the upstairs neighbor's television set that a curfew had been announced, the couple panicked."

"In 2002 Turkey had over sixty (60) (!) political parties and a dysfunctional government of looters,
severe poverty, corruption.
The nation had lost sight of its political future and its own identity,
have-nots (were) alienated from the secular reforms established many years earlier,
the elitist class protected the status quo.
The merchants of Islam --- used every means to manipulate the country's future.
The Kemalism that had grounded modern Turkey with its firm belief in a single state, a single nation, a single language, and a single flag was aggressively assaulted by the power revival of Islam and a disastrous Kurdish separatist movement.
The nation was led away from its foundation in secular reform and ended up in total confusion about its destiny."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6343809.stm

"... , and on to the headlights flashing across the stifling windows of the Hotel Eden."

" ...once he was officially declared a political exile and granted asylum benefits, he cut his links with the Turkish Copmmunists who ran the neighborhood centers, and who had, until then, made sure he was gainfully employed."

" ... it seemed to me that Ka had just one thing in common with these hordes of miserable men, lonely as ghosts. It was the habit of answering his guilt by retreating into the shadows when he would watch these films." (pg 260)

".. I cover my head with this scarf so you won't see my hair ..." and someone whispers back, "You don't do it for us! You do it for God to proclaim your spirituality."

"that painted sging singer you saw turning the wheel of Fortune. Everyone in Ankara has known for thirty-five years that she was the mistress of Fatin Rustu Zorlu, the old foreign secretary, the one they executed."