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Snow

By Orhan Pamuk

(54)

| Hardcover | 9780375406973

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Book Description

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red (“a sumptuous thriller”–John Updike; “chockful of sublimity and sin”–New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother’s funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer’s curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka’s motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka’s youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka’s frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.

Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

Critics

Book Review: Snow by Orhan Pamuk Share

This is the second time I have picked up a novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. The first time was when I read My Name is Red two years ago. That time, I enjoyed the book, but not as much as I wanted, mainly because the book was quite complicated and ... (read full critics)

blogcritics published on Mon, 11 Jul 2011

Frozen assets

Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely 436pp, Faber, £16.99 Orhan Pamuk's new novel is set in the early 1990s in Kars, a remote and dilapidated city in eastern Anatolia famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation and Russia ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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3 Reviews

3 people find this helpful

常常會忍不住停下來，心裡讚歎一聲：真好看。
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Every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart. -- Pamuk
關於理解、關於孤獨、關於詩、關於真正的信仰。

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Amber said on Dec 28, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Hmmm - well, its probably quite good

Started this book a few days ago. Enjoyed 'Museum of Innocence', and this text has a similar, 'purple prose' style that takes a little getting used to. I suspect the arc of the story should be seen as a single unit, so everything doesn't fall into place 'til the end. I confess I find the writing a l ... (continue)

Started this book a few days ago. Enjoyed 'Museum of Innocence', and this text has a similar, 'purple prose' style that takes a little getting used to. I suspect the arc of the story should be seen as a single unit, so everything doesn't fall into place 'til the end. I confess I find the writing a little dense, and its difficult sometimes to empathise with the characters, though this could be a result of the translation rather than the writing itself (he did win the Nobel prize, though has been accused recently of plagiarising some of his stories).
I will persevere :)

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Ian Hodgson said on May 22, 2011 about the Paperback edition | 1 feedback