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5 " provocative, desolate, yearnful" stars !!!10th Favorite Read of 2017 (tie) To read Snow is to laugh loudly and cry quietly. Kars, a small city in northeast Turkey, a backwater that had glory days and multiple conquerings over the centuries. There are Turks, Kurds, Azeris and a few Russians. Most of the men are unemployed and spend their days in teahouses discussing politics and religion. They are demoralized and oppress their women and children.Ka is a poet of Turkish descent who now lives...
And the quiet of this empty city was as if the world had come to an end, and it was snowing.If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.He walked the city in the cold, alone with his poems. Around him, snowflakes formed a blanket of white silence. He traversed Kars, a remote city in Turkey, where he found the poor forgotten, where democracy he saw was nonexistent and the Western world shunned. He, a prodigal son, never fully welcome...
This novel has won a zillion prizes, and has received deafening international acclaim for the way it takes on the "clash of the Islamic fundamentalist East & secular West while retaining the humanity of its characters." I DISAGREE.The book starts out fine, but it devolves into this really odd stream-of-consciousness craziness that feels like a fever dream and makes little sense of events at the end. In addition, the narrator keeps telling you what’s going to happen – big stuff, like deaths, etc....
I read excellent reviews here ; which convinced me that I can not add any new ! but since I am a Muslim & An Arab ; I could feel a lot of the depth of this book which showed me Turkey with a very cruel -but caring- anatomy that even the brilliant sarcasm made it more painful! By considering this fictional book as a new and useful approach for me to what are not so far different wounds from ours ; I will write my words …For me ; it is a magnificent novel , a heart breaking one ; discussing the co...
An Aorist CountryReligion is rarely about dogma or belief and almost always about membership in a group and the feeling of belonging it creates. Snow is an absurdist novel about religion as community and its communal conflicts.The protagonist, Ka, is a sort of thirty-something adolescent who finds himself in a blizzard, in love, in a state ruled by paranoia, and in the midst of a local revolution begun by a provincial theatre-group (remarkably like a Turkish version of Heinrich Boll's Clown). Th...
I read a few sample pages of Snow in the bookstore, drawn by its blurry, snowy cover; drawn by a recent New York Times review; drawn by its non-westernized roots in Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk; drawn, too, by curiosity at this recent Nobel Prize winner for literature. The first few pages mesmerized me, the scene of a Turkish poet riding a bus through the snow capturing my imagination even as I left the bookstore. "The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this we...
(view spoiler)[In a lot of ways, Snow isn't much different from some of Pamuk's other novels--Ka wanders around Kars just as Galip wanders around Istanbul in The Black Book, and Ka's vacillation between acute perception of others and paralytic insecurities about himself is straight from Black in My Name is Red. It's almost as though Pamuk keeps writing the same novel over and over--a novel about how men define themselves, particularly those men who discover they no longer seem to fit into the ve...
Nine Reasons I (strongly) disliked this book:1. The author made himself a character in his story. I just don't like that. I always wonder if they had writer's block and couldn't invent a fictional character to take the reins.2. A snowflake diagram of poetry is involved. I'll say no more. 3. The men in this novel are whiny, infantile, and fall in love with every woman they encounter. 4. In the same paragraph the female lead character is described as seething in hatred and laughing adoringly at th...
Pamuk's description of the delicate (and frequently upset) balance between secular and religious fanaticism in modern Turkey is a gripping story. It is told from a pseudo-autobiographical viewpoint (like DFW's The Pale King) and follows the (mis)adventures of the exiled poet Ka in his return to a town visited in his youth near the Armenian and Georgian borders of eastern Anatolia. The characters are drawn in a deeply compelling manner and there is so much happening that one is surprised at the r...
I would not have finished this book except for reading it for the book club. I haven't been this bored by a book in a long time.
“It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”My first foray into Pamuk territory, Snow is a book about an exiled poet returning to his hometown under the pretense of writing a journalistic article on a suicide epidemic. In his hometown of Kars, our poet encounters snow: a snowfall that changes things for him forever. A blizzardA military coupA theatrical massacreEncounters with love and betrayalViolent fundamentalists and the...
Kar = Snow, c2002, Orhan PamukSnow, is a novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Published in Turkish in 2002, it was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published in 2004. The story encapsulates many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and successfully combines humor, social commentary, mysticism, and a deep sympathy with its characters. Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to...
The expatriate poet Ka returns to his native Turkey ostensibly to investigate a growing number of suicides among "head scarf girls" for an article in a German newspaper, but actually to reconnect with the beautiful divorcee Ipek whom he knew in college. While there, he is caught up in religious and political intrigue. I thought the book was too long, and the characters didn't interest me much, but I really liked the way Nobel prize winner Pamuk creates the atmosphere of the small city of Kars (a...
Say you pay 100 dollars for good seats at a show. You're so excited and full of anticipation. You sit down in your seat and hear the familiar strains of the instruments tuning.Only for the ensemble to sit, instruments in their hand doing absolutely nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds! 4 minutes and 33 seconds of COUGHING, fidgeting and someone shouting "When are they going to start?"This is how this book is to me. You think it's going to be brilliant because it won a Nobel prize. Surely it shou...
A mystery. A social case study.A culture clash.A literary masterpiece.Unreliable narrators.Misogyny.Protest.Political campaigns.Multiple truths.Diverse realities.Deeply moving characters.Darkly funny storylines.Religious fundamentalism.Arrogant humanism.Liberal press coverage.Fake News.National identity divergences. This novel contains so many different strands, I am hopelessly incapable of reviewing it. Ever since I first read it, just after Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize, it has been one...
Written in 2002, this novel predates Pamuk’s winning of the Nobel Prize in 2006. The main character is a Turkish emigre, one of many who live in Germany. He is returning home after years away. We are told he ran into political difficulties with his poetry and decided to leave Turkey. He returns to Turkey ostensibly for his mother’s funeral, but he has also learned through the grapevine that an old flame of his is now divorced. His instinct is that this journey will change his life. Once back in
"To play the rebel heroine in Turkey, you don't pull off your scarf, you put it on" If you were interested in the whole controversy raised by ban of veil in France a few years ago, then this book too might interest you. It is based on real events in a modern and secular Turkey. Here too there is a ban on wearing head-scarves in universities and like, though this is in a country where the majority of the population is Muslim but rulers are still liberals (or rather ultra-liberals). As a conseq
Snow by Orhan Pamuk is literary fiction that brings some tough themes to the reader. Political intrigue, philosophy, romance, secularism, religious fanaticism, East-West relations, radicalism, Western ideals, suicide, murder, and torture are all explored in this novel.Ka is a Turkish poet who has recently returned to Turkey from Germany after 12 years as a political exile. While he comes back for his mother’s funeral, he also heard that a girlfriend has recently divorced her husband and head
After finishing this book I felt virtuous, relieved. Then baffled, irritated, and finally dismissive. Other Good Reads reviewers express the desire to like this book, but proceed to be confused, bored, and insecure. Most wrap up with the dismal feeling that they didn’t GET it, and so didn’t succeed in really liking it. I felt the same, but in addition was supremely annoyed and turned off by it. I’m not so good at post-modern fiction to begin with, but I decided to leave my bias at the door becau...
I have to say, it's been a while since I liked a novel as much as this one and it's been even longer that I've had the chance to lie on a beach and read for a week, so I will say that you may want to take this review with a grain of sand. Pamuk reminded me of what really defines a novel, what moves it beyond a series of events and into a world and Pamuk's Kars is certainly its own world, full of characters whose degree of nuance is exactly as deep as those in a real place--in life you don't know...