Sophia C. reviewed on 6/12/2012 + 289 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 1

Snow centers around a flurry of activity during a three-day visit to one's homeland. Ka, an exiled poet, has returned to Turkey from Germany to report on a wave of girls committing suicide and meet up with a beautiful and recently divorced former classmate, Ipek, in the northeast border city of Kars. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has penned a very poignant, allegorical, and multifaceted story about love, religion, and politics in Turkey; as the snow closes the roads to this once prosperous city controlled by various empires, it becomes the site of political violence. One gets a sense of the range of opinions among the secularists, Islamists, Kurdish nationalists, communists, and feminists (who want to wear headscarves as an assertion of political Islam) and ambivalent attitudes towards Europe. On another level, it is a story about Ka, a lonely man, seeing meaning through love or God who suddenly feels inspired to write poetry again. However, there seems to be lots of walking around in the snow, rapid mood changes in Ka, and unrealistic dramatics in general, which along with the small font size of my copy, made for slow reading. Sometimes I felt I could understand the characters, but at other points they seem very foreign. Nonetheless, I was glad that Orhan Pamuk brought Turkey to Western readers in this book on the list of 1001 books you must read before you die.

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