Snow

Well, I had high hopes for this book when it was given to me. After all, Orhan Pamuk, the author, won a Pulitzer and has been all over the news lately. He must be a good writer, right?

Turns out he is a good writer but this book was not for me. I tried really hard to like it and to care and to want to know what happened to everyone and why it happened (which was what he was interested in), but couldn't. Mostly this is because snow is a very slow moving book.

It takes place in a small city on the Eastern border of Turkey during a snow storm when all the roads in and out of the city are closed. The protagonist is a poet who has been living in self-exile in Germany and he's come back as a reporter to cover a story about suicides by young women in the city. He quickly falls in love (too quickly considering the pace of the rest of the book) and has runs ins with the secret service, Kurds and Ilsamists.

I was hoping for something much more lyrical. Something more poignant. Instead I got a lot of characters all running around in the midst of a mini-revolution trying to stay alive in the most asine of ways.

There were moments of excellent story telling, but most of these were stories within the story. By the time I finished this (a month and a half after I started!) I was trudging through because, I figured, I made it this far, I might as well finish now.

I've got this new “life project” thing that I've started up, whereby I am going to try to read at least one piece of literature from every nation on the planet. Orhan Pamuk's Snow was the first book that I read as part of that.

The point of saying this is to point out that this is not the type of book that I would normally read. While I do occasionally read novels that would be categorized as “capital L” literature, they are usually ones of an older vintage; classics, if you will. It was in that personal headspace that I sat down to read Snow.

Plot-wise, Snow centers around a poet named Ka, returning to Turkey from political exile in Germany, ostensibly in order to investigate a series of suicides among “head scarf girls” in the village of Kars.

Simply put, the book was a masterpiece of desolation and isolation. Throughout the novel Ka must come to grips with not only the head-scarf girls, but through them, his own feelings about his homeland, his religion, and his own emotional landscape. Pamuk's Turkey is a country caught in the crossroads - caught between Europe and Asia, between “secular humanism” and radical Islam, and between love and apathy. It's a fairly difficult read, but overall, it's well worth the experience of reading it.