“Snow” (Alfred A. Knopf, 426 pages, $26) opens like a political novel, but its characters’s disagreements eventually spin out a world of their own, fairly far away from CNN. The hardships of change, in and out of faith, are omnipresent. A blizzard blocks all the roads out of the Turkish border town of Kars, creating a perfect storm for Orhan Pamuk’s themes. Like dancers in the round, the citizens of Kars debate every angle of social and religious controversy.

Mr. Pamuk is regularly compared to Calvino or Borges; he has written several books about mysterious texts. But here his muster of characters – there is the paterfamilias ex-communist, the irresistible terrorist, the feminine dictator – and their sometimes spellbinding speeches remind me more of something like “Hard Times.” And this novel of fatalism in politics is actually more about the difficulty in communicating meaning across borders than the difficulty in finding meaning.

“Snow” is written in a casually reflexive prose of pillowy explanations. Ka, a poet exiled in Frankfurt, finds himself in Kars. He’s officially writing an article about a suicide trend among girls who insist on wearing headscarves to school, but he readily admits that he’s really there to find a Turkish wife: specifically, Ipek, a beauty from Ka’s radical school days who is now separated from Muhtar, a former leftist rebel and poet who has turned to political Islam.

Ka becomes lost in the new categories of secularism vs. Islam. He tries not to pick sides, and when pressed he insists that he only wants happiness, a new thing for him. But his happiness depends not only on Ipek, but on the feeling that he has found God – “the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him.” And this same inspiration gives Ka poems for the first time in four years.

Ka’s poems, which he pauses to write at regular intervals, seem for a while to be the guarantor of Mr. Pamuk’s novel. As local turmoil distracts him from taking any definitive moral action, we learn from the narrator that Ka is stopping at regular intervals to write poems. These poems promise to make everything that happens in Kars, which is like a snake eating its own tail, matter. But that is not quite the case. “It isn’t enough to be a poet,” muses Ka, “that’s why politics still casts such a shadow over our lives.”

As the narrator gradually reveals, the poems are lost, and the novel we are reading is a careful reconstruction of events based on Ka’s diaries. We are left only with the title of the volume, “Snow,” and the knowledge that staring off into the snow was Ka’s great blank escape from whatever was happening around him.