Snow (original 2002; edition 2005)

This book was a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. It starts out with the main character, Ka, an exiled Turkish poet returning to the small town of Kars to investigate the suicides of the 'scarf-girls' - girls who due to a new law are no longer allowed to wear their head scarves in school. The stories told by these girls were sad and completely drew me in. But... it turns out that the story of the headscarf girls is just a ruse and Ka's journey back to Turkey is really to revisit his first love, Ipek, who has recently left her husband who has become a religious fundamentalist. So, forget the head-scarf girls and get drawn into the story of a romance with a lot of complications. But even then, the plot changes again and finally I felt that I just couldn't really get drawn into the new twists and subplots. Beautifully written, but the path was a bit too circuitous for me. ( )

I still can't quite figure out exactly what I loved about this book. Except for one instance, I didn't find any exceptionally deep or poignant writing in it. Who knows, maybe the translation did that. The book did, however, keep me consistently interested from start to finish with very rich descriptions of the city and very full and very real characters. Not as sad as it was made out to be and somehow it was really quite beautiful. A solid 4.5 stars but since I've recently decided to become a little more cautious with my 5 star reviews, it will have to stay at 4.

"Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness." ( )

First the book group discussion from the other night: "Author was a wanker. Anyone want a beer?"

Australian book groups are brilliant some days. :)

I will say that it was a very interesting book in a number of ways, but the distancing of the reader from the action through the use of the sudden segues by the narrator and the sudden revealing of future plots (repeatedly) did make this a hard book to enjoy or even like. And I just wanted to scream at all the introspection all the (very unlikeable) characters went through all the time.

I was willing it all to end much sooner than it actually did. I struggled on to the end because I can be a very stubborn reader, and the author was not going to win this particular battle. However, reading should not be a battle. ( )

This is an important book. For one thing, the author may well be assassinated, in part for having written it. Turkey is in a fascinating place in today's world: the border between the West and Islam and Pamuk lays out the issues with painful clarity. At times, the book feels downright Dostoyevskian. 'Snow' does suffer from 'political novel' disease, but it isn't fatal. The characters feel, for the most part, like real people, not cardboard stand-ins. My main complaint is the ultimate spinelessness of the main character. The West is left without a defender, though my intuition is that Pamuk himself is not so ambivalent. ( )