Abstract
In the middle of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (2002) is a chapter titled ‘But I don’t recognize any of them’, and subtitled ‘Ka in the cold rooms of terror’. It describes the Dantesque journey of the poet Ka through the backstage of the coup that has taken place that day in Kars, as he is taken first to police headquarters and then to the veterinary college, now con-verted into a temporary prison and torture centre, to identify the suspect in a murder he happened to witness. The narrator announces that, like the now dead Ka, who ‘chose not to record them in his notebook’ (184), he will try not to dwell on the terrible things going on in this place. Nevertheless, unlike the notebook, the novel does record the details of this visit.
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© 2014 Sibel Irzik
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Irzik, S. (2014). Textualized Memories of Politics: Turkish Coup d’État Novels. In: Segal, N., Koleva, D. (eds) From Literature to Cultural Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429704_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429704_4
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