Neige (Broché) by Orhan Pamuk - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

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Jul 24, 2007

Darcy rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

bookshelves: twentieth-century-novels

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 see...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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Feb 28, 2008

Hallie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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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Apr 10, 2007

hadashi rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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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Sep 02, 2007

Liza Bolitzer rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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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Sep 02, 2007

Zinta rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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 d...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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Feb 11, 2008

Erin rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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...more

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Jun 25, 2007

Cecilia Baader rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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 Istanbul.
...more

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Nov 29, 2007

Stephanie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

Read in December, 2007

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.

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Sep 29, 2009

Ayu Palar rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

Read in February, 2010

A Turkish poet coming home after his exile in Frankfurt goes to a city named Kars to meet the woman that he loves (or to be exact, he is obsessed with). If you’re familiar with Macondo in 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, you’ll find the same gloomy and mysterious atmosphere in Kars. Although, Kars is much much colder than Macondo since it’s surrounded by nothing but snow.

So, this poet known as Ka decided to visit Kars so that he can meet this beautiful woman called Ipek. While G...more A Turkish poet coming home after his exile in Frankfurt goes to a city named Kars to meet the woman that he loves (or to be exact, he is obsessed with). If you’re familiar with Macondo in 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, you’ll find the same gloomy and mysterious atmosphere in Kars. Although, Kars is much much colder than Macondo since it’s surrounded by nothing but snow.

So, this poet known as Ka decided to visit Kars so that he can meet this beautiful woman called Ipek. While Galip in The Black Book shows his true love by roaming the city of Istanbul to find his lost wife, I found that Ka is a man who thinks nothing but sex. The only thing in his mind is how to make love with Ipek. He even sets up a plan so he can make love with Ipek while her father isn’t home (a barrier for Ipek to have sex with Ka). Ka’s sexual crave is also shown by some paragraphs that mention Ka is attracted to Kadife, Ipek’s sister.

Yet Snow isn’t just a love story. It also reveals the systemic oppression to the believers in Turkey. A suicide plague happens in Kars. The interesting thing is that all girls who committed suicide wear head-scarf, a symbol of honour (to the believers) yet also a symbol of repression (to the atheist). If these girls truly believe in God, why did they commit suicide, a great sin according to the religion? This clash between the believers and the atheists (represented by the Republican) finally erupts in Kars. A stage drama turns into a massacre, and wearing head scarf becomes a symbol of rebellion. And this idea is delivered gracefully by Mr. Pamuk. I feel that he writes this down without any intention to take side. He just simply wants to describe what is happening in modern day Turkey, and Kars is the microcosm of the country.

Snow is a novel with an idea that is relevant with contemporary problems. However, in my humble opinion, the weakness of this novel lies on Ka, the main character. He’s not a strong and decisive character, but as a weak and dilemmatic character, he’s not convincing either. I understand why the women in the story will fall for Blue (the political Islamist) instead of Ka. While the strength of Snow is on how Mr. Pamuk builds Kars with words. You can feel the atmosphere of loneliness and despair of the city. After reading Snow, maybe snow no longer looks beautiful for us.
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Aug 08, 2008

Atalay rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

Read in December, 2002

recommends it for: people who are interested in Turkey

It has been a long time since I read Snow. I think it was just after its first publication in 2002. I am a great fan of Pamuk. I have started to read it again after reading Mackie's comments on Pamuk. Mackie says that most of his colleagues and students in İzmir Turkey did not like Pamuk or his novels. They think that Pamuk is an Orientalist and represent Turkey just the way the Westerners would wish to see. I really doubt that. And then there was Zonana's question to Mackie "What book wou...more It has been a long time since I read Snow. I think it was just after its first publication in 2002. I am a great fan of Pamuk. I have started to read it again after reading Mackie's comments on Pamuk. Mackie says that most of his colleagues and students in İzmir Turkey did not like Pamuk or his novels. They think that Pamuk is an Orientalist and represent Turkey just the way the Westerners would wish to see. I really doubt that. And then there was Zonana's question to Mackie "What book would represent Turkey well?" It is hard to answer that question. I would suggest Nazım Hikmet's Human Landscapes from My Country as a start. But again many Turkish people will oppose my idea of recommending Hikmet's work as representative of Turkish soul.
Snow again. I read th first two chapters in the morning. I have been trying to understand why he has been so hated by so many in Turkey, yet I have to remind you that there are also a considerable number of his fans also. When Pamuk was asked to edit Turkish daily Radikal what he did was to take his revenge from daily Cumhuriyet, Republic. His headline was what Republic had written on Hikmet when he fled Turkey. Although Republic now seems to be a great promoter of Hikmet in 1950s it had a different line. Pamuk implied that Republic has had an hostile attitude towards controversial poets and writers. Most Kemalists would hate Pamuk for, I cannot find and show it to you but as they claim, Pamuk refers to Mustfa Kemal Ataturk, the commander of Turkish Independence war and the founder of modern Turkey, as the Sultan, the padishah whose job was to scare crows, referring to story about Atatürk's early childhood story. According to that story which is known by all the primary school students in Turkey, when Atatürk's father died when he was a little boy he had to spend some time at his uncle's farm for some time. There he scared crows from the fields to protect the crop. The Kemalists were furious. According to them that allusion was an offence of unforgivable type.
Then in Snow he gives voice to İslamist women blaming the state and Kemalists of taking part in the suicides of the girls. As far a I remember Pamuk accuses Kemalists for dealing with things like turban, headcover instead of trying to improve the lives of those girls who commit suicides. I would like to know more about Turkish femminists's response to Snow. As one of the main themes of Snow is the women.
On the other hand, there are still structures of feelings which are neglected. Why do the men treat women so badly? What are the traditions and the logic behind all that, how do they justify their behaviour, traditions, discourse, culture...
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May 10, 2008

bobherzog zog rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

bookshelves: novels

Read in May, 2008

Again, Pamuk is dealing with the major issues of Turkey (and, basically, half the world): East v. West, modernization/globalization, the rise of radical Islam and it's suppression and possible role in democracy. Although, this novel features Azeris, Armenians, Kurds, Islamists, suicides over wearing head scarves, charming terrorist leaders and simple terrorist soldiers, Turkish nationalists and securalists, and plenty of murder and theater in Eastern Anatolia while dealing with the above-mention...more

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Nov 06, 2007

Saxon rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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 of...more

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Sep 08, 2007

Quinn rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

Read in September, 2007

A tricky book, where you don't know if the things that make it sometimes trying are commentary on the monotony of the perennial uprising-coup-calm-uprising cycle of Turkish politics, if the things that make it sometimes saccharine are commentary on the tropes of Ottoman folklore, if the predictability of the male characters are commentary on the sad realities of the eternal masculine. It's devised to keep the reader at a double distance, told as a reconstruction of an author Orhan of his poet f...more

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Jun 26, 2007

Tim rated it:

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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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Jun 12, 2007

Andrew rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

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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Mar 02, 2007

Jack rated it:

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Man, if I could drop a 3.75 bomb on this tome, I'd do it for sure. It was pretty uninteresting until the last quarter of the book when suddenly, Pamuk becomes this engaging, web-spinning, insect-sucking spider of a novelist. I just mean that it gets good at the end.

Pamuk describes things exceptionally evocatively and in the case of 'Snow,' it is actually quite beautifully executed. Maybe some people get dragged down in the descriptions (my coworker did, but she read it in Turkish) b...more

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Jul 08, 2008

Heather rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

bookshelves: literary-fiction, tried-to-read

Read in July, 2008

Since it looks like I'll be traveling during the book club meeting for which I'm reading this, I'm going to give myself permission not to finish it.

I made it half way through, but I'm not enjoying it at all. The main character has no backbone, he's self-involved and seems oblivious to the events going on around him (even when there's armed conflict and torture.)

It's as if the characters are on a stage declaiming their lines. The presence of the other characters is irrele...more

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Jan 26, 2009

Nancy rated it:

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Read in January, 2007

This book was a disappointment—essentially boring and the love stories immature. The most intriguing thing about the book was that he interjects himself into the novel at the end. Also that he gets by without writing poetry by having Ka’s manuscript lost. The motif of snow and how he maintains it throughout the book is appealing as well as the insight into Turkish culture. None of that is enough to overcome the plodding and drawn out pace of the book however.

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Jan 11, 2009

res rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

bookshelves: good

Read in January, 2009

Snow merupakan karya Orhan Pamuk pertama yang saya baca dan langsung menyukai pengarang satu ini. Tak hanya kandungan sastranya yang menarik , pemikiran-pemikiran pamuk yang mendalam , berbobot , kritis , tak jarang nakal membuat saya lantas mengapresiasi beliau.

Pengaruh dan peran Berliani M. Nugrahani selaku penerjemah layak pula untuk diapresiasi begitu mengetahui kiprah dan sebagian prestasinya pada halaman terakhir buku dimana menginformasikan karya terjemahannya : The Kite Runn...more Snow merupakan karya Orhan Pamuk pertama yang saya baca dan langsung menyukai pengarang satu ini. Tak hanya kandungan sastranya yang menarik , pemikiran-pemikiran pamuk yang mendalam , berbobot , kritis , tak jarang nakal membuat saya lantas mengapresiasi beliau.

Pengaruh dan peran Berliani M. Nugrahani selaku penerjemah layak pula untuk diapresiasi begitu mengetahui kiprah dan sebagian prestasinya pada halaman terakhir buku dimana menginformasikan karya terjemahannya : The Kite Runner ; Karya penyuntingannya : Pertarungan Jiwa Billy dan To Kill a Mockingbird.

Sebuah gaya mengisahkan yang lazimnya tidak seperti kebanyakan - saat mendapati Orpan (penulis novel) menceritakan kisah tokoh utama sekaligus sahabat nya - sang penyair Ka.

Berawal dari isu & topik bunuh diri yang dilakukan oleh para gadis muda berjilbab sebagai reaksi atas perintah negara untuk menanggalkannya di muka umum dalam perkembangannya selaku negara sekuler , menjadikan wacana ini sebagai 'tanggapan' seru dalam masyarakat yang memiliki beberapa kepentingan dan kehendak yang berbeda.

Konflik pertama timbul saat menyandingkan landasan sikap yg saling berbeda (bahkan bertentangan) ditinjau dari kaca mata ateis , sekulerisme , nasionalis , dan fundamentalis.

Lalu hadir pula cinta , kecemburuan , revolusi yang menambah marak isi dan kompleksitas cerita.

Disuguhkan pula disana sebuah adegan pementasan teater 'gila' yang pada satu sisi cukup memukau namun tragis seakan mirip dengan pementasan yang ditemukan dalam buku ringan 'Tokaido Inn' nya Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler yang memenangkan The Silver Award Winner.

Tak jarang saya merasa perlu untuk membaca berulang beberapa kalimat & paragraf hanya demi untuk memahami serta meresapi khasanah baru saat menemukan masaknya buah pemikiran dan intisari sekelumit kehidupan yang disisipkan Pamuk.

Pendek kata , ada beberapa poin yang menarik untuk didiskusikan dalam buku ini. Terbayarlah sudah konsumsi waktu yang dibutuhkan selama 4 hari demi menuntaskannya :)(less)

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Dec 29, 2008

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 0375706860)

bookshelves: fiction, identity-crisis, turkey-and-ottomans

Read in October, 2009

recommends it for: anyone with an interest in Turkish politics, soul seekers, outsiders, writers

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When Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006, his Nobel Lecture, entitled “My Father’s Suitcase” contained many passages expressing what he felt it was to be a writer, why it was that writing was essential to his life. There are a few phrases that I believe directly explain both the reasons for this novel's existence and why it is written the way it is:

"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes ...more