Goodreads | Snow

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kindle	2	06/03/2008 09:39AM

Hallie rated it:

04/12/08

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: post-modernists, misogynists who don't know it

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...more 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 because I had heard such great things about this author, and Pamuk didn’t seem like a bogus poser from what I’d read.
The story is about an expatriate Turkish poet named Ka who leads a solitary and arid life in Frankfurt and travels to a remote village in his homeland, ostensibly to investigate a spate of suicides by religious Muslim women protesting the injunction to remove their head scarves at school. He is really there to kindle a romance with a recently divorced woman he knew at university. The novel unfolds over three days when the snow has cut off the town from the outside world. What transpires is a coup led by a dysfunctional theater troupe, a lot of political intrigue, and much ball batting between secular and religious townspeople. Pamuk gives equal billing to every opinion, although they do not differ much in terms of their reductive, inflamed and binary natures, or in ability to capture my interest or sustained attention. This is in large part because the protagonist Ka is stunted,childish and infuriating himself, and the writing is both busy and detached. The political intrigue and opinions in Snow are not interesting or illuminating, as they do not emanate from fleshed-out people, but cardboard cut-outs spouting giant, densely packed and tedious word bubbles.
Inspiration strikes Ka while in Kars, and he stops to transcribe a series of nineteen poems, whenever they descend on him in perfectly realized form. Conveniently they get lost, but a conversation about them between Ka and his paramour goes like this:
“Is it beautiful?” he asked her a few moments later.
“Yes, it’s beautiful!” said Ipek.
Ka read a few more lines aloud and then asked her again, “Is it beautiful?”
“It’s beautiful,” Ipek replied.
When he finished reading the poem, he asked, “So what was it that made it beautiful?”
“I don’t know,” Ipek replied, “but I did find it beautiful.”
“Did Muhtar [her ex] ever read you a poem like this?”
“Never,” she said.
Ka began to read the poem aloud again, this time with growing force, but he still stopped at all the same places to ask, “Is it beautiful?” He also stopped at a few new places to say, “It really is very beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s very beautiful!” Ipek replied.
To my mind, only a child under ten should ever be indulged in this sort of megalomania, and then only by his mother, but Ka is nowhere punished, ridiculed or even chided for his insufferable personality, and in fact I think we are supposed to admire him as embodying the innocence, purity, pathos and single-mindedness that come with being a true artist.
Margaret Atwood says, in the New York Times Book Review “Not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times. [Pamuk is] narrating his country into being.” This seems to me the best case for why Snow won the Nobel Prize. The book makes Turkey legible, as well as digestible, to the West. The novel is chock a block with allusions to white western male institutions – Kafka, Coleridge, Mann, Nabokov (he wrote a lot of stuff in the west, anyway): an annoying and intrusive narrator, a novelist named Orhan, whose games of peek-a-boo get harder and harder to humor, an abysmal, abyssal usage of literary envelopes, a morose and misunderstood genius of a hero who falls desparately in love with a woman he obstinately refuses to lend more than one dimension – the sex scenes, incidentally, are some of the most unintentionally off-putting I have ever read, and recall the experience almost every woman has been unfortunate to undergo at least once, where she feels she might leave the room, go get some cheesecake and stand in the door frame watching her partner rythmically brutalizing a stack of pillows in laughable ignorance of her whereabouts or even existence. Afterwards our hero has the witlessness to add to the injury by calling this essentially masturbatory act “love-making”. In fact, this pretty much sums up my response to the whole book.

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Zinta rated it:

12/04/07

Read in December, 2007

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. I...more 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 were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow..."

Snow never stops falling throughout this lengthy novel, and indeed becomes a barometer of the human condition. "Snow" is also the title of a poetry collection the Turkish poet, Ka, writes over its time span. A diagram of a snowflake is his diagram of his core self, with branches into imagination, reason and memory. As snow gathers over the events of the story, it becomes at times a blizzard, at other times a gentle white blanketing over a trampled earth.

Ka is traveling to the city of Kars to write an article about an epidemic of suicides among young Turkish women. As the force of westernization has entered the predominantly Muslim city, these young women have been "freed" to discard their head scarves. Their religious beliefs, however, are such that to bare their heads in public is more than they can bear--they would rather die. While investigating the suicides, Ka meets recently divorced Ipek, and he is instantly enthralled. The ensuing story is as much one of political rebellion as it is love story, complete with executions, betrayals, love found and love lost, and mysteries never quite solved.

I've grown up on European literature, with its dense and intricate plotlines, stories with no particular rush to reach conclusion and no linear path in getting there, in contrast to the fast-paced western literature with spare plotlines, quick action, and neatly wrapped-up endings. Of course, there are exceptions, but when I am in the mood to sink deep into a multi-layered tome, I choose non-western literature, and when I want a quick tap-dance of literary skill, I choose American literature. Each has its own pleasures. Snow is no exception. I enjoyed this blizzard, even if at times I lost sight of the path for all the white stuff.

Even the love story reminded me of the difference in the expression of love in different cultures, with Ka's falling into something nearing a worshipful obsession, immersing himself whole into the object of his affection--while a westernized love story would be more geared toward seduction and conquest, less about the dance of courtship and romance. There is surrender to the heart with nothing left in reserve in non-western literature that fascinates me. Do or die. Love or leave. For this reason alone, I enjoy reading literature by a variety of international authors; each provides a view into a varied perspective and life sense.

In any culture, however, the human heart breaks for the same reasons. We read of Ka's devastation at learning his beloved has betrayed him with another--from this heartbreak is seeded a suspicion of murder (did Ka or didn't he?). The scene of confrontation between Ka and Ipek is perhaps the novel's most moving: hearts are shattered even as they continue to find comfort in each other's arms, a fatal mix of love threaded with hatred, and finally released by the chill of apathy. Pamuk writes of the complexities of love as far more baffling than reason alone might explain, and each time as unique as a snowflake.

Snow is not a quick read. Nor is it an easy one. Like Ka's love, it requires immersion and a certain degree of surrender. It is a skilled and often marvelous novel, even if I am not convinced it is worthy of the Nobel. I would say not. Yet it is worth the effort to move through this snowfall, if only for the occasional moment of sheer literary mastery.
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Katie rated it:

05/08/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: those not afraid of a slow pace and gloomy setting for a book!

Somehow I misplaced this book while in the middle of it! Argh...is there anything more frustrating! Well, I'll review it when I find it and finish it.

8/07
Part of the reason I misplaced this book while in the middle of it was that it was taking me forever to get through. Not exactly a page turner. I did eventually find it again, and vowed to plow through to the end. It is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner, and I figured the excruciatingly slow pace and dark, gloomy subject MUST be leadin...more Somehow I misplaced this book while in the middle of it! Argh...is there anything more frustrating! Well, I'll review it when I find it and finish it.

8/07
Part of the reason I misplaced this book while in the middle of it was that it was taking me forever to get through. Not exactly a page turner. I did eventually find it again, and vowed to plow through to the end. It is, after all, a Nobel Prize winner, and I figured the excruciatingly slow pace and dark, gloomy subject MUST be leading up to a really deep and worthwhile finale. Here's a quick plot sketch (no spoilers):

A lonely, shy, and awkward Turkish poet (named Ka), having lived in political exile in Germany for years, returns for a visit to his native country and decides to visit the remote and derelict city of Kars. He ostensibly makes the trip to report on the sociopolitical happenings of this town (Muslim girls have been committing suicide over the issue of being forced to remove their headscarves, which they've chosen to wear for religious/political reasons). However, his real motivation is to see Ipek, the woman he was in love with many years ago.
Soon after Ka arrives in Kars, a snowstorm shuts off all routes into and out of the city. Many strange things start to happen, including scuffles between radical Islamic students and the government, and finally a coup by a passionate and deranged actor/theater director. Ka is drawn into the middle of the politics through no desire of his own (but a desire to win the love of Ipek). Throughout all the madness, poems are flowing from him as they haven't in years, and Ka struggles to make sense of his own life and unhappiness.

If this sounds like it adds up to a dark, serious, and possibly even depressing book, that's probably because it does. The mood of the book is aptly symbolized by the snow motif: when I recall the book it's with a sense of heaviness, of pewter grey sky and pervading cold.

I think it was, after all, a deep book: with a statement to make about human nature in general, and Turkish nature (both individual and cultural) in particular. However, I was so numbed by the end that I'm not sure Pamuk's philosophical ideas made much of an impression on me. (What was numbing was not only the dreariness of the landscape - literal and figurative - that the book describes, but the crawling pace of the action and the unnumerable characters, parties, and names to keep track of.)

What made the biggest impression on me was a sense of Kars itself as a Turkish city, and the cultural and political struggles of the nation. Although there was a lot of political history in the book which confused me (actually, I would recommend that a reader start with a Wikipedia read on the subject of modern Turkish history - this would probably make the book easier to follow), I did gain a sense of how different elements of Turkish society grate against one another and sometimes violently collide....less

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Ali rated it:

10/05/07

bookshelves: novels

Maybe Snow is not a great novel, but I liked it very much as it’s, I believe, a perfect illustrated description about what’s going on in such a typical society in our area. I understand if the situation is not very much understandable for outsider readers, (or maybe so-called westerners are more than enough “politically correct” to not confess), but those who know the situation in our societies, and at the same time are fair and equitable enough, would say, I believe, that Snow is a very...more Maybe Snow is not a great novel, but I liked it very much as it’s, I believe, a perfect illustrated description about what’s going on in such a typical society in our area. I understand if the situation is not very much understandable for outsider readers, (or maybe so-called westerners are more than enough “politically correct” to not confess), but those who know the situation in our societies, and at the same time are fair and equitable enough, would say, I believe, that Snow is a very realistic drawing of what we’re suffering of. I, on my behalf, feel and understand every single character in the novel, even “Ka” whom like Nabokov, when he was 19th, “keeps on writing his solitary poems while he heard the guns and saw bloody fights from his window”! or when Necip (a young character in the novel) dreams about a "landskape", almost the same as Nabokov's (Speak, Memory).
I liked very much the allegory about the snow which in one way is as beautiful as God’s message, and on the other hand trap the small city, inclusive Ka, as tide and closed as the people’s minds, no matter what ideals they have and which ideology they support.
Apart from some small wholes here and there in Pamuk’s description about events and behaviours, how the narrator of the story could manage to know every thing about everyone, even some very private individual’s feeling, the novel is beautifully formed with different informations about so many characters and situations, unless Pamuk doesn’t tell us; in a city which is trapped in snow so badly that no train can leave and no car can enter, even the army is not able to reach the city, how people could produce food during 4 days!
می توانم حدس بزنم که این کتاب به فارسی ترجمه نشده باشد، و اگر در نهایت تعجب به فارسی ترجمه و منتشر شده باشد، می توانم تصور کنم که دست کم نیمی از کتاب تحریف شده و بهم ریخته باشد. خواندن کتاب را به همه ی عزیزان ایرانی توصیه می کنم، به ویژه خانم ها....less

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Darcy rated it:

11/03/07

Read in November, 2007

<spoiler alert!>

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...more <spoiler alert!>

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 very physical space they occupy; in this case, Ka can't decide if he can still be Turkish after living in Germany for so many years.

It isn't a question that the book ends up answering, either. Ka returns to Turkey only to discover that writing doesn't make it any easier to deal with the decisions he finds himself making throughout his stay in Kars: does he believe in God or not? Does he love Ipek or not? Should he stay in Turkey or not? Does he support Westernization or not? It would be easy to reduce this novel to a story in which East meets West through the figure of Ka, but the novel seems to be much more interested not in that intersection, but in what occurs when one tries to write about that intersection. In fact, this is a novel made up entirely of all kinds of writing--newspaper articles, play productions, poems, speeches, video recordings, and Ka's notes. All these are filtered through the narrator, who is attempting to locate "Ka" in those very documents--as though if one could simply find the green notebook, or discover the meaning of the snowflake diagram then one could concretely define Ka's identity. The end result is a rather nasty joke--Orhan Pamuk the narrator spends ages collecting all the bits of paper that comprise the life of Ka and then spends even more time piecing it all together, only to come up with not much: Ka is not a terribly interesting person. He's a washed-up poet and a crappy lover. The intense focus on identity leads only to a dead end in which Ka cannot be recovered through writing, just as the events in Kars cannot be explained or understood through the novel.

Ka's motivations, his misogyny, and his indifference to others generally go unremarked by the narrator, causing the reader to wonder where, exactly, the narrator's fascination with Ka comes from. It is, of course, an ironic fascination--in becoming so wrapped up in Ka and Ka's actions, the narrator has failed to understand the underlying problems in the system and in the coup: there is no "right" side in this novel--the secularists, the Kurdish Nationalists, the Islamic fundamentalists, the Westernized Turkish exiles, the ex-Communists are all simply passing around the same system of power. It is a system (and one that Ka participates in throughout the novel) in which women become icons for men, just as Ipek is an icon for Ka. As a result, the initial story that brings Ka to Kars--the suicide girls--drops out of the narrative until even Kadife becomes fed up with it. This story fizzles out as Kadife neatly sums it all up: "I'm sick of hearing men talking about why suicide girls commit suicide." It is this story--this initial narrative that Ka sympathizes with but does not apply in his own life--that provides the keys to the other stories of isolation, social pressure, and political coercion. But the suicide girls end up forgotten in this book as the men talk about them to the point of rendering those women only stories.

I like Pamuk's novels, but I find them very difficult to read. They are slow, philosophical, and the main character is often so contradictory as to be slippery. This novel doesn't have the same type of experimental structure as My Name is Red--the narrative framework is more subtle. But I think that given the focus on writing (Ka cannot discover himself through his poems, Orhan Pamuk cannot discover Ka through the novel, and no one can figure out the suicide girls), identity and politics, this strategy is better. ...less

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Andrew rated it:

06/20/07

A strange novel who's "failing," if it can be called that, may just be a lack of real ambition. The novel is written from a "once-removed" or reconstructive perspective. This is nothing new and nothing inherently to complain about, many great novels have been written like this (example: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, but that novel is written so because the "protagonist" is compromised and in this case taken by the devil, so a third party really brings us closer t...more A strange novel who's "failing," if it can be called that, may just be a lack of real ambition. The novel is written from a "once-removed" or reconstructive perspective. This is nothing new and nothing inherently to complain about, many great novels have been written like this (example: Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, but that novel is written so because the "protagonist" is compromised and in this case taken by the devil, so a third party really brings us closer to the action). But here I'm not quite sure. And again, I'm not sure if this is a "failing," but it certainly leads one to feel a bit disappointed. As many people have pointed out, it'd be better to read Ka's poetry than read this novel, but of course what he have is this novel. I don't think it'd be fair to say that this is simply a failing of the author: "he wasn't good enough to write the poems so he wrote this novel from a distance." That seems too easy, and after all, is Pamuk really felt like he should have written the poems he would have, maybe they would have been good, maybe not.

But instead we have an outsider looking into a sea of passion (but not quite blind passion). The town is full of radical Islamists, radical republicans, radical Marxists, and radical lovers. But they all seem to understand the need for each other and the fact that everything is political. The Islamic Students realize that they need atheists to run the state, the political showman need the Islamists to be "moved" by their work, Ka realizes that Ipek needs him to get over Blue, etc. In this world Islam is political and atheism is a religious statement.

The problem and issue seems to be that we are all more interested in radicals (be they terrorists, lovers or actors or poets). While nominally this is a novel about extremes, on closer look it reveals itself not to be at all. It is a novel about the social and political interaction of extremes. This is inherently disappointing, we'd all much rather prefer to delve into the radicals and read Ka's all consuming poetry.

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Tim rated it:

07/01/07

Read in May, 2007

This book is gorgeously written, hypnotic, and probably too long. Snow permeates the book, and Pamuk's descriptions have the effect we get from noticing that it is snowing slightly outside--we get a small, pleasurable jolt of surprise that pulls us away from the action briefly. Of action there is much. The characters are trapped in the city of Kars, which serves as an effective external mechanism for putting pressure on them to act and interact. The book starts to get really interesting fairly e...more

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Duc rated it:

06/23/08

bookshelves: currently-reading

Read in July, 2008

If the contents of the book didn't happen in the real world, this book could be read as a work of Science Fiction or even extreme fiction. Unfortunately, the ideas and practices of what is written happen in the real world. Even though, this part of the world is so remote from my reality, that it seems almost like a science fiction: such issue as whether or not to wear a head scarf, face cover in public or school. Cables are strung and hooked up ad hock through out the neighbor hood just to c...more

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Liza rated it:

12/27/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: plane riders, people who like prize winners, lecture-goers

I read this book on a plane leaving people I loved in a city I had once thought would be my own. I was basically ready to be moved by anything, and this book still didn't do it. The last flight I was on the person next to me was also reading it, so it seems to be a plane book. Snow, snow, snow, snow. Yes, it can symbolize a lot of things. But where are you going with it, after all? And usually I like to think I can tell, but in this case I wasn't sure whether the failing was mine or the book's. ...more

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Liza rated it:

09/02/07

Read in August, 2007

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...more

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Orange rated it:

07/21/08

Read in July, 2008

Dostoevsky of Turkey! My heart swoons.

Quotes --

"We're not stupid, we're just poor! And we have a right to want to insist on this distinction."

"Mankind's greatest error. . .the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity. Throughout history, religious leaders and other honorable men of conscience have always warned against this shaming confusion. They remind us that the poor have hearts, minds, humanity, and wisdom just like...more

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Cecilia rated it:

06/25/07

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: european intelligentsia

"The third act began with Funda Eser singing a folk song about a woman who'd been raped, an engaging number to make up for earlier parts of the drama that the audience had found too intellectual or otherwise obscure." And so with a single sentence Pamuk explains his novel Snow, last year's Nobel Prize winner. Snow centers on a Turkish poet who returns to his homeland to write an article about the girls who keep committing suicide in Kars, an isolated village far from Is...more

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hadashi rated it:

03/30/08

Read in April, 2007

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 ...more

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Erin rated it:

02/11/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in April, 2007

Quotes:

"Immersed as he was in the dusky melancholy that had begun descending over the city, he still felt happy. A long procession of images paraded before his eyes as he awaited his next poem - a waking dream of ugly unadorned concrete buildings, parking lots buried in snow, teahouses and barabershops and grocery stores all hidden behind their icy windows, courtyards in which dogs had been barking in unison since the days of he Russians, stores selling spare parts for tractors alongsi...more

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saxonb rated it:

11/20/07

bookshelves: school

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: people interested in modern turkey

I heard alot about Pamuk. He seems to be gracing the A&C sections of all the periodicals that I frequently read. This has sparked an interest in him for quite some time now. This is the first novel that I have read of his, Snow was assigned for my Novel on the Globe course.
Unfortunately, Snow proved slightly disappointing. After a lengthy in-class discussion, I pinpointed my troubles with the novel down the three main things that can be easily summed up:

*way too episodic and often time...more

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grant rated it:

05/07/07

Read in April, 2007

I had some problems with Snow. In general, I find it hard to stick with a book that you know isn't going to end well, reading on as a character you've come to emphasize with heads towards a bad finish. Yet the political/social/religous issues Palmuk is grappling with have not been resolved in Turkey (hence the recent demonstrations), and the literary devises he uses to tell the story (having it written by a 3rd party who has only notes about the poems written by Ka, and who enters the narrative ...more

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Randy rated it:

04/20/08

Read in February, 2008

recommended to Randy by: Jeanne

This is a good read. It for me, serves the highest purpose of fiction which is to enlighten me about times places and cultures and conflicts that I'd otherwise be ignorant about. And it's a good story that held my attention all the way thru. It's set in very recent Turkey in a town past it's heyday that is a crossroads of cultures and politics, ancient, foreign and modern.

The author is Turkish I gather. I heard him interviewed on NPR a while back. I believe he still lives in the same home w...more

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Meredith rated it:

10/31/07

Read in April, 2007

recommends it for: Those interested in the world, especially the Muslim world

I confess I knew next to nothing about Turkey before picking up this book to read for my bookclub. Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize in Literature and this book garnered many awards, so it seemed a good place to start.

The book is not an easy read. The protagonist is the ex-pat poet Ka; or, is the protagonist really his friend who is narrating the tale, incidentally named Orhan? Girls in rural Turkey, whose lives are diminished by grinding poverty, begin to want an education and a way out, but ...more

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