Neige

"Snow" by Orhan Pamuk is some of the finest writing of the past decade. Pamuk, the Nobel Prize Winning author of "My Name is Red," "The Black Book," and "The Museum of Innocence" presents here a portrait of modern Turkey in all its complexities and contrad...ictions. The story concerns Ka, an middle aged exiled poet living in Germany who travels to Kars, a remote Turkish city with the dual purpose of reporting on a string of suicides of "head-scarf" girls and to reconnect with a woman from his past. The book's frame narrative is fascinating and typical Pamuk - the narrator (implied to be the author himself) plays with his readers, giving hints and clues to what will happen in fifty or sixty pages and putting a narrative together that keeps the ready wanting to move forward to its startling conclusion. While in Kars, Ka comes face to face with archetypal figures representing aspects of Turkish society. What makes the book work is that Pamuk does not indulge these metaphors heavily and instead lets them speak for themselves. From head-scarf girls to washed up actors to religious school boys to Kurdish militants to our erstwhile protagonist, we are presented with characters who exude sadness and melancholy but are not meant to be pitied or made into caricatures. The novel talks about many themes beyond the simple "East-West" dichotomy so present in books about Turkey and which make the book rich in ideas and narrative. My two criticism are that I found that this book took me a VERY long time to read and that often, I found myself annoyed with Pamuk's meandering style. It is not for a casual reader - one must be willing to completely inhabit the world of the book. In spite of its density, the novel is immensely satisfying and well deserves its place as one of the best books of the past twenty years.

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.