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"Don't be so sure," the publisher replies. "There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. They fear us not because we are journalists but because we can predict the future; you should see how amazed they are when things turn out exactly as we've written them. And quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about."

Muhtar Bey, Ipek's ex-husband, is the mayoral candidate for the Party of God. He's also an appliance dealer, and a frustrated poet. When Ka interviews him, Muhtar describes his secret religious conversion at the lodge of the Kurdish sheikh Saadettin Efendi, his discovery of the spiritual key, and his double life as a secularist by day and monotheist by night. Muhtar's conversion led to the end of his marriage (no more sneaking off at night to pray), and to his writing "an important poem. … As a poem it was flawless. I swear to you," Muhtar tells Ka. He sent the flawless poem to a literary magazine, Achilles Ink, but it never appeared.

Embittered, Muhtar sought solace from his sheikh. But the old saint, he lamented, "knew nothing of modern poetry, RenÉ Char, the broken sentence, MallarmÉ, Joubert, the silence of an empty line.

"This undermined my confidence in my sheikh," Muhtar continued. "After all, he hadn't been offering me anything new for some time, just Keep your heart clean, and God's love will deliver you from oppression and eight or ten other lines like that."

For her part, Ipek, when queried about the suicides, had said, "The men give themselves to religion, and the women kill themselves."

And Blue, a celebrity political Islamist hiding in Kars, who came to Kars to stop the suicide epidemic, suddenly pulls his interviewer, Ka, close to him, kisses him on both cheeks and says: "You are a modern-day dervish. You've withdrawn from the world to devote yourself to poetry. You would never be the pawn of those who would denigrate innocent Muslims."

At the beginning of his story, while the bus to Kars pushes on through the blizzard, Pamuk quotes a line from one of Ka's early poems: "It snows only once in our dreams." This only-onceness would be a trope on the scientist's rule that every snowflake has six sides and crystalline structure, and every snowflake is unique. It's a simple leap from snowflake to individual soul, though the snowflake melts and soul does not; the point of the snowflake-to-poem correlation would be the unique utterance inside the recognized shape. Unlike the snowflake, the poem does not melt; unlike the soul, the poem is material, it is recorded.

The Novelist Orhan, sifting through the notebooks and effects Ka left in the four years following his journey to Kars, is able to reconstruct in vivid detail the circumstances and perhaps even the stimuli of Ka's inspirations, 19 in all, in a fashion that's to me entirely convincing. Orhan describes his novelistic sources, his retracing Ka's steps and talking to all the surviving participants who crossed paths with Ka in those sublime days. Orhan discovers a map drawn in one of the many notebooks of exegesis that Ka filled while refining and arranging his book of poems, Snow. The map is a snowflake: three intersecting axes, with three poems each at six ends, and one poem in the middle.

It's possible, reading from the list of Ka's poems in the order he wrote them at the back of the book, to pinpoint the page in the novel where each poem occurred. Only the poems themselves, set down in the poet's green notebook, are missing.

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