Customer Reviews

Snow

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Novels like Pamuk's "Snow" can be understood at different levels. Consider it as pure entertainment; for the political intrigue and thrill; or as a virtual door into a foreign place, the lives of far away people, their time or preoccupations.

Pamuk has attempted to present us with all three options in one. The reader is exposed to a panoramic view of Turkey's political and religious conflicts and ethnic tensions. His multitude of characters represents every conceivable strand of Turkish society: Atat'rk secularism and pro-European modernism on the one hand and various religious factions of Muslim faith on the other. By compressing the events into one locale, a remote, poor and backward town, Kars, in Eastern Turkey, he creates a charged playing field. A major snowstorm has cut off the access roads to the town, bringing the conflicting positions to boiling point. A couple of murders occur. The mayoral election, which would have been won by an Islamist over a local Secularist, is cut short by a military coup. In addition, the town has become notorious in the Istanbul headlines for several suicides and suicide attempts by the so-called "headscarf girls". The assumption being that the girls decided to end their life because they were not allowed to wear their headscarf in school. Yet, their motivations are more complicated than that.

Within this complex political turmoil, wanders Ka, the protagonist of the story. A recently unproductive poet, he returned from Germany to attend his mother's funeral. He has also reasons for coming to Kars. Presenting himself as a journalist, he claims to be interested in the stories behind the headscarf girls' suicides. On a personal level, he wants to find a "Turkish girl" to marry and take back to Germany. The object of his dreams and desire is Ipek, a young woman he admired during their student days and who now lives in Kars.

The story is told by Orhan, a close friend of Ka, four years after the events in Kars. Orhan travels to the town to retrace Ka's steps, to find his notebook with the poems and also to shed light on the political dramas of the day. In many ways he describes Ka as a somewhat confused, middle-aged man, whose exposure to the realities of Kars result in his questioning his life so far. He is taking in all political and religious positions, getting increasingly entangled as events unfold. Wanting to please his various interlocutors, he appears to flip-flop his own positions. In discussions with religious leaders he even wavers in his secular beliefs and appears to be overwhelmed by a sudden spurt of poems that come to him as through some "divine channel".

While going into minute, sometimes tedious, detail in defining time and place, the activities are increasingly repetitive and predictable. The characters, despite being given ample dialogue are not convincing and the rationale for some of their actions seems almost farcical. The newspaper editor who pre-empts the next day's news headlines, the theatre director/actor and his belly-dancing companion who play leading roles in the secularist movement. Nobody is quite what they want or appear to be. The women, in particular, despite their importance for Ka, are hollow. His love for Ipek is not based in reality but rather on his daydreams, both past and future. Her beauty is praised constantly, but nothing much of her character is revealed.

Pamuk himself described "Snow" as a political novel. Is it convincing in that ambition? For the reader who is not that familiar with Turkey or its language, it is difficult to judge its value in this category. My own interpretation is that Pamuk created a satire on Turkey and its historical and present-day problems. The exaggeration in the description of Kars, political intrigues, religious fanaticism, military brutality, and Ka's own personality would lead to that assessment.

The narrator, Orhan, interjects his own 20-20-hindsight vision of Ka in his interactions with the other protagonists of the story. Several times, he addresses the reader directly and, halfway through the book, reveals what happens to Ka after his return to Germany. An all-knowing narrator can be an effective technique in a story, but it is not very successful here. Rather than complementing the reader's understanding, Orhan competes with his friend for their attention. The result is a strange mix of over-detailed reporting on the events and circumstances in Kars during the snow storm and very generalized, almost philosophical commentary on love, poetry, happiness in which the character Ka is embedded. Actually ** 1/2 stars [Friederike Knabe]

This is an incredibly complex tale of unfilled love, political intrigue, intellectual vision and revolutionary ambitions, all meeting up in a small, unassuming Turkish town of Kars. The dynamics of the story involve a host of significant characters who define themselves as committed to any one of a number of political causes: the modernizing of the state, the wearing of the hijab, freedom of cultural expression, women's rights, and intellectual tolerance. Within this parochial milieu, the reader finds a virtual cross-section of modern Turkey, a nation caught up in the cross-currents of redefining itself. The protagonist Ka is a washed-up poet who has just returned to Turkey from a prolonged exile in a rather passive West, and is looking for a new sense of Eastern mysticism to revitalize his lagging spirits. What he finds instead is a crucible of political and social ferment that draws people into deadly conflict and misunderstanding rather than the promise of peaceful enlightenment and joyous reconciliation. This is anything but a happy homecoming for Ka as he journeys into the heart and soul of a troubled civilization trying to come to grips with the very profound forces of change. The snow that is the title of the book and continually falls throughout the narrative represents the philosophical nothingness and randomness that Ka faces in his efforts to make sense of this disturbing maelstrom unfolding around him. Even Ka, as part of the security forces, is compromised in his efforts to reach that greater understanding of purpose and decides in the end to escape back to Germany with his new found lover. Even that plan comes to a bad end. As his story is retold, through the rather awkward convention of a friend piecing things together four years after his assassination on return home, I am left with a couple of strong impressions:
A. Reconciliation of conflicting views is possible in the mind of the indivdual, as opposed to the group, if there is a willingness to set aside prejudice and distrust;
B. Intercultural conflict is inevitable where people are not willing to listen to the poet's voice within them provide that larger view of life.
This is definitely a novel that covers a lot of relationships, places and ideas within a small space. A good read but definitely not his best work.

The novel `Snow' is such a complicated tome, chock full of sub-plots and side-bars that you wonder, "What is this story about?" You really don't get that answer until you are deep into the book. It registers at over 400 pages, and it reads like a VERY LONG book. I'm wondering if the translation is longer than the original. That being said, it certainly is an interesting read.

To begin with, `Snow' has a huge cast of characters- sometimes with names so similar to each other, you have to check back to refresh and see who is doing what. Snow (the actual stuff falling from the sky) is also one of the main characters. With astonishing creativity, Orhan Pamuk imbues this novel with the suffocating effects of a winter blizzard on a small town in Turkey, replete with tons and tons of snow. There is snow, snow, everywhere, and snow permeates every backdrop and interaction between characters. This snow gives the protagonist, Ka, a starting point for his raison d'etre as a poet (finding the meaning of life in a godforsaken place called Kars). And whereas the snow became a hindrance to any movement in or out of the town, it was also the beauty of the snow through which Ka saw and felt everything. It enabled Pamuk to create an almost bizarre atmosphere for the story, allowing incomprehensible things to happen in this sad sack of a town, and it enabled the poet Ka to use the simple snowflake as an inspirational metaphor for his poetry and his life. The book is so full of farce, that although the snow is quiet and in and of itself simple, the characters of `Snow' are comical when they are trying to be serious and court jester-ish even in the face of death.

Additionally, whereas every inch of this book is stuffed full of snow, you soon realize that there is more to `Snow' than snow. The main character, Ka, initially comes to Kars to write about the "head scarf girls", but with all the mini-plots, sub-plots and side-stories, you are soon made aware that the novel 'Snow' is about Islam, it's about poverty, it's about poetry, it's about friendship, it's about Turkey, and it's about fanaticism (in any form). In the end, however, I felt that 'Snow' was truly about one thing...love. Honestly, at the end of the book I thought all these words and all these stories came down to that ONE thing.

Finally, when people hear that Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I think they believe this book must be intellectually superior and highbrow. But the farcical nature of the story lays that to rest. There were times when I couldn't even tell if Pamuk was being serious or irreverent or cheeky or...I don't know. But basically, Pamuk uses many, many words to evoke images of a poverty-stricken, snow-covered city in Turkey called Kars with a litany of ersatz and eccentric characters. It did feel like it was longer than it needed to be, and I suppose that since this book was originally written in Turkish, some things have been lost in translation. Subsequently, I'm not sure what Pamuk was really trying to accomplish- if anything at all. Reading it was a little choppy, but I attributed that to the translation also. It's hard to judge Orhan Pamuk's writing style because of that, but it seems that he leans towards the quirky and irreverent facets of life. You have to admire the effort it took to write a book of this length and spectrum; however, as is true with most cross-cultural things, `Snow' was probably better in its original incarnation- Turkish- than it is in the English version.