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Dec 17, 2009

Darcy rated it:

<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...

12 comments like (47 people liked it)

Apr 12, 2008

Hallie rated 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 becau More...

4 comments like (33 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

hadashi rated it:

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 deat More...

1 comment like (19 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Liza rated it:

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...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2009

Zinta rated it:

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...

0 comments like (10 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2011

Nile daughter rated it:

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 ; More...

13 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

Nate rated it:

Nine Reasons I (strongly) disliked this book:

1. The author made himself a character in his story. I just don't like it when they do that. I always wonder if they had writers-block and couldn't invent a fictional character to take the reins.

2. Snowflake diagram of poetry. I'll say no more.

3. The main character is a whiny, infantile, grown man who falls in love with every woman he encounters. As is the narrator whose name happens to be the same as the author, a More...

0 comments like (13 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2008

Erin rated it:

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...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Jun 25, 2007

Cecilia rated it:

"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...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Dec 12, 2007

Stephanie rated it:

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.

2 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

lita rated it:

Apa yang menyebabkan orang bunuh diri? Jawabannya bisa bermacam-macam. Tapi satu asumsi akan muncul jika bunuh diri itu dilakukan secara beruntun oleh penduduk di suatu tempat dan dilakukan oleh orng yang memiliki ciri yang spesifik: perempuan muda yang berjilbab.

Kasus bunuh diri tersebut terjadi di sebuah kota kecil di Turki bernama Kars. Peristiwa tersebut menarik Ka, seorang penyair Turki yang lari dari negaranya karena ideologi yang dia anut: atheisme.

Pertentangan an More...

6 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 13, 2010

Ayu rated it:

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 i More...

7 comments like (7 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2008

Atalay rated it:

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 woul More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 16, 2008

bobherzog rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2007

Saxon rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Quinn rated it:

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...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 01, 2007

Tim rated it:

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...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2007

Andrew rated it:

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...

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 19, 2007

Jack rated it:

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...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2008

Heather rated it:

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...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 10, 2009

Nancy rated it:

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.

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Aug 16, 2010

Sandybanks rated it:

Come, come again whoever, whatever you may be
Heathen, fire-worshipper, sinful of idolatry, come
Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times, come
Ours is not the portal of despair and misery, come.

Inscription on a wall at Rumi’s tomb, Konya, Turkey.

Something strange happened to me in Rumi’s tomb. I’m not sure if it was some kind of a spiritual experience, but there is definitely something spine More...

9 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2012

José-contemplates-Saturn's Aurora rated it:

Surah Al-Ahzaab, Verse #59
‘O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks veils all over their bodies that is most convenient that they should be known and not molested: and Allah is Oft-Forgiving Most Merciful."

"

"

Ka is travelling by bus: a white scenario outside unfolds: it’s snow relentlessly falling…and he falls asleep.

Ka, or Kerim Alakuşoğlu, a Turkish poet, returns to Kars, an More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Synesthesia rated it:

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, figeting 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 pr More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 17, 2009

res rated it:

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...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Ajeng rated it:

"when they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They're human beings -but we're just muslims. When we write something, it's just ethnic poetry."

The idea of the book is the confrontational fonts of east and west, of western secularist and the so-called political Islamist, a term I agree to since their Islamism is shown in the book as a political expression, not a spiritual one. In fact, the book does not speak about Islam as a faith per se, but a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 25, 2011

Elisa rated it:

Se penso al velo, mi viene in mente il chiacchiericcio televisivo nostrano sulla legittimità del suo uso da parte delle donne islamiche in territorio europeo. Al di là del legittimo discorso sulla sicurezza pubblica, spuntano come funghi le considerazioni delle donne di turno, interpellate semplicemente in quanto appartenenti al genere femminile (e quindi, capaci di proferir verbo per l'intera categoria, secondo la logica del talk show), sul pericolo che il velo costituisce per la dignità della More...

8 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jul 15, 2011

Moon 佛月球 Будда Луны rated it:

IDEOLOGICAL ANTIPODES

Set against the Secular Western World of seemingly Godless pomposity is the severe religious convictions of an Anatolian city grief stricken with poverty, where the foreboding whirling of the falling snow lolls it further into its forsaken, forlorn isolation, as it covers its woeful desolation in deathly silence. That echoes and reverberates like a deafening thunder bolt against the world slavishly succumbing to globalization.

This is the Turkish city More...

8 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Jeremy Allan rated it:

Pamuk infuriates me. I remember reading his Nobel acceptance speech and chafing at his ideas about art, where it comes from, what it is meant to do, who has the ability to make it. There is always a sense with him of art being singularly a gift, and one bestowed upon a rare few. This persists in Snow. And I resist that.

Yet it is impossible to deny that in many ways this is a beautiful book. There is no question that Pamuk, himself, is gifted. And even where I grumbled to read about t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 23, 2010

Eyoki rated it:

For me this is a book that drowns under its weight of symbolism. It begins with the name "Snow", which is "kar" in Turkish. Our hero is "Ka". The town is "Kars". Snow is falling, isolating the city, while Ka is isolated within the city. And so it goes on. Add to that the stageyness of the plot, which gives the story the feel of a play and then produces within itself a play, and you get a sense of the novel's suffocating self-consciousness.

Neith More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)