Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4307 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 440 pages

Synopsis
After twelve years in political exile in Germany, a poet Ka returns to Istanbul for his mother's funeral, and takes a commission to report on the municipal elections in Kars near the Russian border. There he discovers a dangerous atmosphere, with tensions running high between the political Islamists and the 'enlightened, pro-Western' Turkish military. The second half of the novel takes place over a three-day period. Following the set-piece military coup, Pamuk brilliantly explores such themes as politics, love, ethics, religion and poetry, as we gradually discover the real truth concerning the poet and the snow covered old-world city of Kars.

Customer Reviews

snow
Poor, a holiday book and I was left feeling cheated after forcing myself through it over a week.
Neither a cutting edge political message, which it started out feigning to be, nor a decent thriller. The climax point in the book is.... a play, enough said. A few deaths and a bizzare transition from seeing the story from the eyes of our main character initially to switching to being narrated half way through. Highly irritating tendancy for the narrator to disclose key facts before they happen.
Clearly a highly intelligent author, but the point of the book is what?
Dont waste your time.

A novel about the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey
In "Snow" the poet Ka returns to Turkey after more than a decade in Frankfurt, and journeys to Kars, far in the east. Among the things he hopes to find there is an old classmate and love, Ipek, now separated from her husband. He also plans to explore and report on a wave of suicides by girls there. It is snowing when Ka arrives, and the snow continues to fall, cutting off the town from the rest of the world. There is tension there: an upcoming mayoral election, the struggle between religion and secularism, a heavy-handed police presence. The conflict between Islam - and, for example, the right of girls to go to school wearing head-scarves - and the secular society the government has imposed causes the most problems.
Ka is an outsider. He begins as a dutiful journalist, talking to a variety of town figures, trying to learn more about the suicides, but finds himself drawn into this larger conflict. Throughout the country, and especially in this region, it is no longer the Kurds that are perceived by the authorities as being the greatest threat, but the increasingly influential Islamists. Ka, respected as a poet but tainted as one who has presumably been polluted by Western thought and ways, is viewed with both suspicion and interest by both sides. The police are reluctant to rough him up - as they do the locals - because of his Istanbul and German connexions, while the Islamists see him as the enemy but warily accept that he might be able to help convey their message. Eventually, he is also used as a go-between by both sides.
It is the desire to write a book about the poems written by Ka that leads the narrator - an alter-ego Orhan Pamuk, and long-time friend of Ka's - to tell this story.
Snow is a book about the difficulties faced by a nation torn between tradition, religion, and modernization. Set in the farthest east of Turkey, the locals are certain that in Western eyes they're all considered as ignoramuses. Pamuk effectively portrays these difficulties, and the many ambiguities in contemporary Turkish life.
The novel is expertly read by John Lee for Random House Audio.

snow
Winner of the Nobel prize for literature 2006...
This is the first and only book that I have read of Orhan Pamuk and I suspect it was not the best place to start. The book is in general slow, it has some parts in which it picks up but slows down again. Ka may have only been at Kars for three days but it seemed like weeks.
Not the "gripping political thriller" that I expected.