In a time of modernization preceding the current-day Islamic revolution, he is looked on as a dangerous stranger, an outsider, in the country of his origin. During the story, his interactions with everything from the architecture of the Ottoman Empire, to a former/current love interest, to police spies, to a local newspaper publisher become pregnant with meaning as he searches about for meaning in an otherwise mundane existence. Though, as an exile, his heart should be with the Muslim reactionaries -- particularly since he is being shadowed by the secularist regime -- in the end he feels rootless and dissatisfied with both the changes going on around him and the promise of a return to things as they used to be. His love for his former mistress drives him to write poetry and to perform a poem entitle "Snow" at a local theatre, and it is during this event that the secularist regime panics over a supposed rebellion regarding the headscarves, and fires into the crowd.
In both Gordimer's work and Pamuk's work, the characters are simple representations of societal biases. They serve, therefore, as psychological vehicles to work out, quietly and internally, the large events of the society's external roiling brutality. In doing so, both authors are able to bring to the forefront of the reader's mind the prejudices and preconceived notions of what the society means. Is Apartheid justified? The reader goes into the reading process already having some answer. Then the action of the novel, small and intimate, plays out against the backdrop of the larger society and the reader begins to ask new questions about how justified it may or may not be. Similarly, the tensions of the modernization movement in Turkey are juxtaposed against the little interactions in the street of a man who feels empty about the whole...
In this way, literature become a force for analyzing history as something more than the recitation of facts and policies. Psychology and culture, personal desire, friendship and bias -- these are the things that drive the small characters found in the two novels, and the reader realizes, when reading their stories, that these things also drive the people in his own time and place, and in past times and places, when they were making history.
Perhaps the reading of both Snow and July's People benefited from having dealt with topics and locales that were unfamiliar in many ways to this reader. An open mind was ready to accept the possibilities for change and challenge discussed in the book because there was not enough knowledge of the content of the daily lives that filled the novel in the first place. However, it seems more likely that by placing the characters in the midst of change and then having them run through their paces, both authors were able to tap into an interest that readers have about understanding how they fit into the world. It was easy to ask oneself whether, if life had placed the reader into one of the situations described in the books, the reader would have responded differently. Since the events occurred in the midst of events that already had some general feelings attached to them -- the reader did, after all, have some opinion about apartheid and about the Islamic struggle -- the recounting of events from the perspective of someone who was there "firsthand" and saw and reported, provided excellent food for thought. Literature in one of its better functions should do this. It should bring us to ask questions when it writes history.
