Overview:
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
"Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore," Stendhal wrote. This line serves as one of the epigraphs to Snow, Orhan Pamuk's mysterious, moving and -- yes -- political new novel, which includes a scene where guns are shot into a theater audience. Firearms notwithstanding, there is nothing crude about Pamuk's subtle work. The author of seven previous novels, he has taken as his great subject the tensions between West and East, religious and secular, in his native Turkey. His most recent novel, My Name Is Red, was an ingenious, tightly crafted tale of murder among miniaturists -- artists who illuminate manuscripts -- in 16th-century Istanbul, for which he at last garnered much-deserved recognition in the United States.
Snow, which takes place in the present day, may be Pamuk's most topical novel yet. Ka, a poet from Istanbul, has returned to his native country for a visit after 12 years in exile in Germany. When Snow begins, he is on a bus en route to Kars, a mountain city in the "poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey," at the former border of the Ottoman and Russian empires. An old friend at an Istanbul newspaper has asked him to report on the impending municipal elections as well as an epidemic of suicide among teenage girls, the latest of whom is one of the "head-scarf girls," a group of young women who have been barred from the secular university for covering their hair. In hope of reuniting with Ipek, a beautiful former classmate who now lives in Kars, Ka agrees.
Kars is a tightly wound knot of tension between secular and religious forces, and Ka's investigations lead him into encounters with all the major players, including the charismatic Blue, an "infamous Islamist terrorist" who is in hiding after issuing a death threat against a talk-show host who insulted the Prophet Muhammad; Necip, a pious student who hopes to become the world's first Islamist science-fiction writer; and Ipek's sister, Kadife, the leader of the head-scarf girls. These forces come to a head on Ka's first evening in Kars, when an acting troupe stages a classic play called "My Fatherland or My Head Scarf." At the play's climax, the heroine rips off her scarf and burns it, and the religious youths in attendance begin to riot. Soldiers storm the stage, opening fire and killing a number of the audience members.
This is the briefest possible introduction to Snow's elaborate plot, which works its way by twists and turns through numerous digressions, dialogues and genres. Pamuk's work is reminiscent of the great storytelling classics -- The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's Decameron or Jan Potocki's Manuscript Found in Saragossa, with their bawdy comedy, intricate design and mystical overtones. At times Ka plays the traditional role of the trickster: In one brilliant sequence, he negotiates a statement of unity between the city's Islamist, Kurdish and socialist leaders for the sole purpose of luring Ipek's father out of the hotel where they live, so that he can make love to her. Elsewhere he is compared to a dervish: During his few days in Kars, he regains his inspiration for the first time in four years, and poems come to him as if dictated by a higher power.
The poems that Ka writes in Kars turn out to be governed by a "deep and mysterious underlying structure" similar to that of a snowflake, and the same is true of the novel itself. The deeper you read, the more the symmetries multiply. Nearly every character has a double, down to the narrator himself, who is eventually revealed to be a novelist friend of Ka's named Orhan, telling Ka's story after his death based on information gleaned from his notebooks. All these mirror images add up to create a dizzying effect, which is deepened by the snow that begins to fall on the first page of the novel and does not let up until nearly the end. Practically a character in its own right, it blankets the mean streets of Kars, shutting Ka and Ipek together in their hotel, casting its strange light in unexpected places and closing the roads to all traffic in or out, so that the city becomes a strange hothouse of nervous activity and revolutionary unrest.
This disorientation is surely Pamuk's intention. But even after the novel has come to its wrenching conclusion, the atmospheric haze is difficult to dispel. Snow has none of the tautness of My Name Is Red; its action moves thickly, at times impenetrably. Clarity is not enhanced by a tone that at times jerks wildly from knowing sophistication to faux naiveté. This is a shock after the elegant control of My Name Is Red, and the non-Turkish-reading reviewer is inclined to blame the translator, who is new to Pamuk's work. Nevertheless, Pamuk's gift for the evocative image remains one of this novel's great pleasures: Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow.
"A major work . . . conscience-ridden and carefully wrought, tonic in its scope, candor, and humor . . . entirely contemporary . . . with suspense at every dimpled vortex . . . Pamuk is gifted with a light, absurdist touch . . . In Turkey . . . to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage. Pamuk [is] that country's most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize."
–John Updike, The New Yorker
"Not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times . . . Snow is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts . . . [Pamuk] deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be."
–Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review
"Powerful . . . Astonishingly timely . . . A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir . . . [Snow] is forever confounding our expectations."
–Megan O’Grady, Vogue
"From the Golden Horn, with a wicked grin, the political novel makes a triumphant return . . . As if Nabokov and Rushdie had taken their circus act on the road, or Carlos Fuentes were Anatolian instead of Aztec, or Milan Kundera remembered how to laugh."
–John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine
"[A] great and almost irresistibly beguiling novelist . . . [Snow] is enriched by the author's mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost."
–Richard Eder, New York Times
"Richly detailed . . . A thrilling plot ingeniously shaped . . . Vividly embodies and painstakingly explores the collision of Western values with Islamic fundamentalism . . . An astonishingly complex, disturbing view of a world we owe it to ourselves to better understand."
—Kirkus Reviews
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their
Fellow Men!
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