Snow falling on Turkey

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	• Snow Orhan Pamuk Vintage, 2005 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 131 reviews view larger image
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Snow

Orhan Pamuk's novel "Snow" is a meditation on Religion, Poetry, Love, Gender relations, and Politics. It is a difficult, challenging work. Although the author himself described "Snow" as a political novel, it is much more. I learned something of Turkey and its politics fron the book, but I was moved far more by the author's reflections on issues that transcend the politics of a particular place.

"Snow" is the story of a man known as Ka. Raised in a secular home in Istanbul, Ka is 42 and unmarried when the book begins. He has just returned from a 12 year political exile in Frankfurt, Germany to attend his mother's funeral. While in Istanbul, Ka arranges to visit a border Turkish city named Kars to cover the upcoming local elections (the mayor of Kars has just been assassinated), to investigate a rash of suicides among young Muslim women, and to try to kindle a romance with a beautiful woman named Ipek with whom he had been acquainted as a student and who has recently been divorced. Ka is a poet. During his years in Frankfurt, he never learned German but continued to write in Turkish. He had not been able to compose poetry during his final four years in Frankfurt and, during that time, he had had no romantic involvements. Ka's story is related in the voice of a writer named Orhan - creating some distance and some sense of irony -- who describes himself as a novelist and an old friend of the poet. He visits Kars four years after the death of his friend and tells his story.

Ka spends all of three days in Kars before returning again to Frankfurt, but the short time is eventful for the city and for the protagonist. He witnesses a murder in a cafe and a coup in which the military takes control of the city and suspends the upcoming elections. He becomes, briefly, sexually involved with Ipek. Although a secularist, he becomes drawn to religion and meets with a Shiek. He also has fateful encounters with a charismatic Islamic terrorist, Blue, with whom Ipek and her younger sister Kadiffe have been romantically involved. Perhaps most importantly, Ka finds himself able to write poetry again. In his few days in Kars, he composes 19 poems in bursts of inspiration, all but one of which he writes in a faded green notebook.

During Ka's visit, Kars is in the midst of a three-day snowstorm which closes access to the city. The falling snow is the critical symbol of the book which appears in virtually every chapter with many meanings. It symbolizes,variously, silence, isolation and loneliness, cold, purity, innocence, sadness, and much else. Ka becomes captured by the six-sided figure of the snowflake. The individuality of each snowflake becomes emblematic to him of the human condition. When he returns to Frankfurt after his three days in Kars, he devises an elaborate symbolism for the classification of the 19 poems he composed in the city based upon the six sides of the snowflake. Another pervasive symbolic object in the book is the dog -- both as a family pet and as a stray. Dogs appear on the streets as an object of affection and compassion.

Ka's short and tangled love affair with Ipek is at the center of this novel as Ka hopes to have her return with him to Frankfurt. This hope is dashed against Ka's own weaknesses and ambivalences, together with politics and chance. When he returns to Frankfurt, he becomes a lonely, alienated figure, unable to write poetry, who wanders the streets and becomes addicted to pornography. Four years after his return he is murdered under circumstances suggesting political motivation.

"Snow" has a great deal to say in its long discussions of the search for God, the nature of creativity, and the need for love. Pamuk's treatment of these universal human themes is intertwined carefully with his particularism -- his discussion of the streets, places and people of Kars. Pamuk also focuses upon the complex political situation of Turkey, torn by the wish to become part of the European community and retaining its religious, Muslim character. Secularism and religion are each represented in this book in several alternatives rather than by just two diametrically opposed groups. The tension in the local political situation becomes a symbol of range of choices that individuals in all cultures must face, as part of being human.

This book has recieved a variety of reviews on this site. It is a slow, difficult work that may not be to everyone's liking. For those readers with a bent for philosophical and religious reflection, this is an outstanding novel.

Robin Friedman

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Too Much Snow

When I first began reading this book (My first taste of Orhan Pamuk, who friends had been urging on me for YEARS), my first response was awe, amazement, adoration. By about a third of the way through, it began to strike me that the snow was a very convenient literary device for angst, and so I began to wish the blizzard would be over.

I found the glimpses of Ka's life in Frankfurt tantalizing and mysterious. But his long-lost love never came to life for me as a character, and frankly the descriptions of lovemaking in this book are -- well, let's just say that if you could get a high school kid to pour out his fantasy of what a first sexual experience might be like, it might be something like what we have here, though in much more graphic terms (Here the scenes are rather misty. . . ) They did not cause me to open my eyes or sit up straighter or whatever. OK, enough with the impassioned kissing.

I relished the philosophical sparring with Blue, as I don't see that in many (Western) novels. I also loved the melancholy of the city he describes (even though I did find the many mentions of snow very labored, by the end). The thread of the girl suicides was lost halfway through, and so I guess it was just a "hook." Too bad, because the interviews with the girls' families were VERY interesting to me.

I loved that all throughout the book the main character would feel urges to write a poem, and these sections (where he just had to rush back to his hotel and write) were really the best parts of the book for me.

Now I've started to read MY NAME IS RED, and already just the first line disappoints me, but I will definitely finish it.

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Snow falling on Turkey

If the contents of the book didn't happen in the real world, this book could be read as a work of Science Fiction or even extreme fiction. Unfortunately, the ideas and practices of what is written happen in the real world. Even though, this part of the world is so remote from my reality, that it seems almost like a science fiction: such issue as whether or not to wear a head scarf, face cover in public or school. Cables are strung and hooked up ad hock through out the neighbor hood just to c...more If the contents of the book didn't happen in the real world, this book could be read as a work of Science Fiction or even extreme fiction. Unfortunately, the ideas and practices of what is written happen in the real world. Even though, this part of the world is so remote from my reality, that it seems almost like a science fiction: such issue as whether or not to wear a head scarf, face cover in public or school. Cables are strung and hooked up ad hock through out the neighbor hood just to catch the live broad cast of a television show. It is almost a work of dystopia but this is the real world that Orhan Pamuk is writing about.

When reading about exotic locales, I'm often reminded of the works of Paul Bowls. He was an American who went to live in Tangiers and wrote novels about those foreign places. There is certainly an element of expatriation and distance as the narrator Ka goes back to his place of birth to explore his past relationships. While, Bowls explores cultural difference and the dangers of mixing white culture with the natives, Orphan's work takes on political and moral issues. He mixes the issue of suicide, religion, and morals with a political act. This political act seems like a fashion choice in some parts of the world, but a major rebellious act in this region. It's an all too real a premise: whether or not to be allowed to wear a head scarf and whether or not to kill oneself if one is not allowed to do so.

If it was imaged as a work of fiction or even science fiction, it would have been brilliant. Although it happens in the real world, it is even more frightening. This is a case where life is stranger then fiction and reporting straight from it with honesty and being able to see the concept of the novel in its simplicity is an amazing work of recognition.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism?these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek?s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.

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