Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 17 January 2014

The Turkish novel Snow by the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is set in a winter of the 1990s when Ka, a middle-aged poet of small renown suffering from writer’s block, travels from his exile in Germany to the Eastern Anatolian town Kars. He wants to meet his adored former schoolmate İpek who has recently divorced her husband. At his arrival under heavy snowfalls Kars is cut off. The following three days are filled with courting beautiful İpek and with talking to military, police, Secret Service, secularists, communists, nationalists, moderate Islamists, and the wanted Islamic extremist Blue. Ka is drawn into the thicket of conflicting political convictions, but he is just a poet blindly in love who doesn’t take much notice of the violent coup de main that takes place in his presence. Poem after poem flows into his pen and into his green notebook. Then the snowfalls stop, traffic connections are cleared and the old order is restored. Ka and everybody else has to face the consequences of their actions.

The genesis of the poems together with Ka’s life story serve Orhan Pamuk as the perfect background to touch on the complex political and cultural situation in Turkey, a country between Asia and Europe, between Islamic heritage and western lifestyle, between tradition and modernism. It shows the dilemma of the Turkish people in search of a new identity which pleases followers of all the different ideological and religious movements present in the area, be it on the national or on the individual level. Orhan Pamuk’s language and style remain simple throughout and make it easy to follow the plot. The characters are described very carefully and with a certain degree of irony and playfulness.

All in all, I enjoyed Snow by Orhan Pamuk very much and I warmly recommend it both for its literary quality as well as for the glimpse into the Turkish soul which it allows.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.

I bought this book after finishing Istanbul Memories of a City as I wanted to continue to stay in Istanbul and learn more about the city. I had just visited Istanbul in February this year and was so mesmerized by it that I wanted to learn more, continue to dig my mind into it. While Istanbul Memories of a City reads more like a biography the museum of innocence is a fiction narrated by Kemal, over a 30 years life span. This book had me hooked in a strange way, I wanted to give up on reading it, as I had the feeling that nothing was happening, page after page it sounded too predictable and it kind of drove me insane that nothing ever happened between the two protagonists, Kemal and Füsün for so long, in a way I found Kemal's obsession with Füsün similar to the one of the Princesse de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette  that I had to study in French literature.  Somehow each time I told myself I can't take this any more,  how can Kemal be so passive, accept to give up on his free will, become so dominated but is he really? Orhan Pamuk manages to intrigue the reader and creates a kind of similar obsession that Kemal is experiencing, somehow it is fantastic writing, it is a courting that goes on for years, in a society where everything goes really fast, Ohran Pamuk slowed everything down, pacing the story to the rhythmic beat of a heart, creating expectations and slugging the whole story down again and again. I still can't say if I loved or hated this book, it will not leave you blasé, it will unsettle you,  create discomfort and will remain as a very strong memory, something which rarely happens with a book.