At an early age, I decided that I would not write anything political," says Orhan Pamuk. This is a surprising comment, coming from an author well known in his native Turkey for his forthright condemnation of the death sentence issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and of the Turkish government's brutal repression of Kurdish separatists during the 1990s. It's especially surprising since his latest novel, Snow (Fiction Forecasts, July 19), published by Knopf this month, grapples with the politically charged subject of Islamic fundamentalism, telling the story of a poet visiting a remote town on Turkey's eastern border where there has been a rash of suicides among female students forbidden to wear head scarves in school.

But it's also true that Pamuk is better known to readers of fiction for a series of novels that, while they often explore the tension between traditional Islamic values and the Westernizing policies of the modern Turkish state, are just as notable for their complex, modernist narrative structures and their concern with such existential matters as the nature of consciousness. From The White Castle in 1990 through The Black Book and The New Life to My Name Is Red in 2001 (two earlier novels remain untranslated), English-speaking critics have noted the social and political backdrop of Pamuk's work, but have been more struck by its brilliant imagery and literary erudition.

"Snow is my first deliberately political novel," the writer acknowledges by telephone from his home in Istanbul. "When I started writing fiction some 30 years ago, I had seen that the best authors of previous generations had destroyed their talent to serve a country, to get politically involved, or to make a moral command. But 20 years later, after I had established myself as an author both inside and outside Turkey, I was critical not only of the war the Turkish state waged against the Kurdish guerrillas, but also of its position on human rights and freedom of expression. I published some articles, most of them outside Turkey because I couldn't publish them at home then, and I began to get a bit notorious for making political comments outside my books. I said to myself, 'Why don't I once write a political novel and get it out of my system?' "

Snow, however, is no didactic polemic. Pamuk allows the young women who choose to wear head scarves, and the fundamentalist men who incite them, to speak powerfully for themselves; they may not convince Ka, the poet, but he is moved by them. "One of the pleasures of writing this novel," Pamuk comments, "was to say to my Turkish readers and to my international audience, openly and a bit provocatively, but honestly, that what they call a terrorist is first of all a human being. Our secularists, who are always relying on the army and who are destroying Turkey's democracy, hated this book because here you have a deliberate attempt by a person who was never religious in his life to understand why someone ends up being what we or the Western world calls an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. It is a challenge and a duty of literature to understand the passions of anyone, to try to enter the spirits of people, which various taboos forbid us to understand."

It's clear from the writer's fervent tone that this last sentence forms a crucial portion of his artistic credo, but—characteristically—he does not leave it unchallenged in Snow. "How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart?" asks a character called Orhan Pamuk (one of the novel's many sly, postmodern touches), and his real-life namesake does not have a definitive answer. "In the 1950s and '60s, people hoped that they would understand everything by writing a political novel," he goes on. "Here I am saying, 'Well, I bowed my head in an attempt to understand the underdog, but there are limits. Beware the claims to understand all: it's a political mistake.' I have joked in Turkey, and let me continue my joking here, that this is my first and last political novel; it should only be done once in life!"

Pamuk's last book, a memoir of his youth entitled Istanbul, was published last year in Turkey. The writer is currently going over the English version with Maureen Freely (who also translated Snow); Knopf expects to release it in spring 2005. Pamuk is ruefully aware that "something is always lost in translation; it breaks one's heart so much. And most of the time it's not the translator's fault, it's the language's fault. I feel sometimes that I am trapped in Turkish, which is hard to translate." At least in English, which he speaks fluently, he can make adjustments with Freely: "When something is untranslatable, when we understand that this pure beauty, this little flower, will not pass and will be damaged in translation, we sometimes try to invent new things as a sort of consolation: not the original flower, but a new flower."

PW wonders if the writer who has so frequently depicted conflict between Islam and the West in his fiction sees any hope for the resolution of this conflict in the real world, where it has assumed crisis proportions. "Not when the likes of Bush or the arrogant Turkish ruling elite try to solve the tensions between conservative Islam and modernity with bombs," he replies. "That is a dead end. But I am an optimistic person. I think that these guys who try to modernize or Europeanize or westernize the rest of the world by force, they will disappear. Globalization will continue, I see that as a positive thing, but peacefully, with mutual understanding among tribes and peoples and nations."