This is an interesting, highly detailed novel that not only explores a poet's relationships but presents it in the wider view of critical issues in Turkey's history. The backdrop of a play that turns into a coup d'etat attempt in a small Turkish town is facinating and allows diversions to all sorts of characters and situations.
I can't say that I liked this novel as much as Istanbul or My Name is Red but it is still an interesting perspective on Turkey. ( )

A slow, peculiar, and oddly emotional book. Following a Turkish poet as he visits a regional town in eastern Anatolia nominally to do a newspaper article about girls committing suicide, the book takes the reader on a journey through Turkish secular politics, Islamist discontent and the emotional struggles of one atheist Turk rediscovering his conflicted desire to return to the Muslim faith. This is of interest to anyone curious about modern Turkey but, more broadly, to anyone who has felt the conflict between atheism and a longing to believe. Pamuk is a thoughtful, inventive, disconcerting and at times quite funny writer. He writes as if uninterested in human emotion and yet nails those emotions perfectly. ( )

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the winter of 1992 in the city of Kars in the north-eastern part of Turkey. The story is narrated by Pamuk himself as he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka, who has traveled to this remote town to write about the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves. This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent. ( )

I found this book very challenging and it took me a long time to read it (and even longer to write about it) so this review may not do the novel justice. Snow is about an expatriate poet name Ka who returns to Turkey from Germany ostensibly to write about young Islamic women in the provincial city of Kars who are committing suicide in protest of the secular state's rules against wearing the veil. His ulterior motive is to reunite with Ipek, a beautiful woman he's longed for over many years who is recently divorced. In his time in Kars, the city is isolated by a snow storm and a military coup is staged to round up political Islamists. Ka finds himself in the midst of much political maneuvering and finds himself inspired to write a cycle of poems ending a long dry spell.

There are flashes of humor in the book such as a newspaper publisher who writes stories before they happen (and is often correct) and the the theatricality of political movements is satirized by having an acting company stage the coup during a theater performance. Much of this book though is fairly bleak, with a lot of emptiness, misunderstanding, intrigue, violence, and torture. The symbol of the snow is exploited to make the reader feel trapped as well in the claustrophobic microcosm of Turkish politics and religion. People in this book never really speak or act like people would in real life but instead are often symbolic representations of particular point of view, probably one of the factors the made this a book to read slowly.

Pamuk also kicks the reader in the gut. SPOILER ALERT: Midway through the book Ka finally realizes happiness by making love with Ipek. The very next chapter flashes forward four years to Ka - alone and miserable - being murdered in Frankfurt. Reading the rest of the book knowing that there's not a shred of hope for Ka is all the more challenging. END SPOILER

I found this book an interesting means of learning about the complex nature of modern Turkey. I appreciate Pamuk's literary style, but I can't say I "enjoyed" the book as much as I was unsettled by it.

Favorite Passages:

"The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic powers. . . . Happiness and poetry can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterward either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness." - p. 127 ( )

I've been reading this over the last couple of days, a great book. On the surface it is about the author searching out his friend Ka and his lost poems. The author follows Ka from Germany to Kars, where the poet seems to find his muse.

The book also talks of the problems facing Turkey today, on the crossroads of Europe and Asia, not knowing which way to go. Nationalists, Islamists, Modernists, Separatists, Europhobes and Europhiles, an explosive combination together in one small town. ( )