Snow opens with a man riding a bus to a city called Kars in a snowstorm. We are given a few quick details about the bus and the weather, are told “our traveller” is wearing a “thick charcoal coat” – and then, only three paragraphs in, the narrative is interrupted. “We should note straight away,” we are told, “that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars …”

As the snow falls slowly and silently outside the bus window, we watch the traveller slip into a reverie and then sleep. This “lull” allows the narrator to step in again “to whisper a few autobiographical details” about the sleeping man, Ka. “I don’t wish to deceive you,” the narrator says. “I’m an old friend of Ka’s and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars.”

The narrator may not wish to deceive, but enjoys teasing us. Is he piecing together Ka’s story from notebooks and witness testimony? Doesn’t he know more than a historian could? He’s clearly an author, even alluding to a novel he has written – The Black Book – and another that he is planning, The Museum of Innocence. (This is a big clue for readers today, as Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence, came out six years after Snow.) He eventually reveals his first name: Orhan. Well then …

These interjections are (as learned commenters pointed out on last week’s Reading group) both a traditional aspect of Turkish oral storytelling – and strikingly postmodern. As John Updike wrote in the New Yorker: “[Snow] bares its inner gears of reconstituted memory and ends by promising its own composition … The airy spirit of postmodernism also haunts the shadows and spiral staircases of Pamuk’s intricate narrative.”

There’s more to Pamuk’s formal explorations than tricksiness. It isn’t only postmodernism that haunts the novel: it’s also the future. From those very first sentences about the coat and “shame”, we get a sense of trouble ahead. As the story develops, every reference to the future seems freighted with woe. Sometimes it will be “years later”; at others, it is less. In one memorably moment, it is in “exactly seven minutes” that Ka will be a mess, “his heart pounding as if he were heading alone into a war zone”.

The future is an obsession for just about everyone we meet. For Ka, it is a prospective marriage. Elsewhere, the religious half of the local population is as concerned about the afterlife as the one they are living, while the rest believe “Europe is our future”, instead of their own way of life.

Even the local newspapers are prepared a day ahead, but somehow predict what will happen. Serdar Bay, the proprietor of the Border City Gazette, tells Ka: “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.”

A novel is, by its nature, usually read quite a while after it was written. And just as writing can change the future, the future can change our reading of a book. Ka’s political exile takes on new resonance now, because Pamuk himself had to leave Turkey a few years after publishing Snow. It’s also hard not to read our own current problems into Pamuk’s at once specific and universal depiction of a “forgotten” city, full of people angry with the liberal elite, ready to take violent revenge, even if they destroy themselves in the process.

But let’s save Snow’s fascinating politics for next week. For now, let’s just say that Pamuk has an eerie ability to map out the future.