Snow

İpek is the enigmatic and thoughtful beauty whom Ka falls in love with during his three days in Kars. Even the narrator falls in love with İpek when he meets her four years later, stating that she is “more beautiful than anyone could have imagined” (342). Throughout much of the narrative, the reader only sees İpek through Ka’s rose-colored glasses, but in the latter half, İpek has more of a voice and expresses her reasons for not going with Ka to Frankfurt.

After Ka tells İpek that he has come to Kars to marry her, Ka thinks to himself that what truly connects him and İpek is that they have both “lowered [their] expectations of life” (36). Both Ka and İpek were idealistic youths involved in Marxist causes, but they have both settled into nonpolitical lives in middle age. Nevertheless, Ka retains an idealized view of İpek that he struggles to reconcile with the revelation that she cheated on her ex-husband, Muhtar, becoming involved with the dangerous and manipulative Blue.

İpek has a sense of world-weariness and experience that Ka lacks. When Ka tells İpek he is in love with her, she responds that love that “blooms this fast is just as fast to wither” (211). The idea of disappointment is a theme that is connected to İpek’s character. Her prime disappointment in life was her inability to conceive: She says that she “longed for a child but the child never came” (420). When the narrator tells İpek that he is lonely and loves her, she simply tells him that she doesn’t “have the heart” for anything like that anymore (420). The losses that she experiences drive her to focus on familial life. İpek’s transformation is one of acceptance and making peace with life’s disappointments.

A “blue-eyed Casanova” (357), Blue is an uncompromising Islamist militant with a checkered past. He is an amazing storyteller, and Ka envies his charm and magnetism. When Ka discovers that Blue seduced İpek, his admiration turns into hatred. İpek describes Blue as her “one true love in life” (358).

Blue embodies many of the novel’s contradictions. He believes that there is “only one Western point of view” and that the West will not accept a democracy that does not “imitate them like monkeys” (228); ironically, however, a picture of Venice hangs on the wall of Blue’s hideout (234). At the secret meeting of various factions at Hotel Asia, Blue is the unspoken leader. The boys from the religious high school admire Blue, and there are many rumors about Blue’s past that magnify his power in the Kars Muslim community. However, despite Blue’s charisma and attractiveness, his anger and jealousy surface in his controlling behavior towards Kadife. Blue’s mistreatment of women becomes more obvious later in the story.

Blue’s hidden motivation is a desire for fame, which becomes clearer as Ka converses with Blue more later in the story; Blue embraces his death in the hopes that his name will “become a battle cry” (323). Blue’s “letter of execution” offers more details about his past (321-22): He claims that he never murdered anyone, but it later emerges that this was a lie, as he was responsible for the murders of the TV host and the director of the Institute of Education. This letter of execution also notes that Blue is a poet.

Kadife is İpek’s younger sister and the leader of the “head-scarf girls.” Kadife is vocal, courageous, and strong-willed. Necip says he loves her because she is “more independent” than any Turkish woman he has ever met (134). Kadife plays an important role in the political and personal events in the story, transforming positively by the novel’s end.

Kadife tells Ka that though she first became involved with the headscarf girls as a form of teenage rebellion, she slowly began to believe in God. However, Kadife’s motivations for becoming involved with politics are rooted in her romantic involvement with Blue. The narrator states that “sharp-eyed Kadife[’s] […] only real motivation for associating with the head-scarf girls was to get closer to Blue” (374). Kadife’s complicated feelings for her sister, İpek, are another driving force in her life. She tells Ka that she always felt “ugly and evil” compared to the “beautiful and refined” İpek (222-23).

Kadife is a natural performer and leader, expressing herself powerfully onstage and during political meetings. She handles the requests of a Kurdish grandmother mourning her grandson with grace, reassuring the woman that she “[will] do everything in her power to get her story published” (270). Kadife serves a short-term prison sentence following the accidental shooting of Sunay Zaim, and she does not speak to the narrator about the events. By the novel’s completion, Kadife is married to Fazıl and has a child.