This was my first encounter with Orhan Pamuk, and I was deeply charmed by the masterful storytelling that weaves through the threads of history and inserts the atmosphere of the described place in such a palpable way.

The story unfolds in a very skillful manner between the events in a small town and the personal "inner" perspectives towards the solitary world of a modern man.

Pamuk's writing has the power to transport the reader to another time and place, making them feel as if they are right there, experiencing everything along with the characters.

His attention to detail and ability to create vivid and complex characters add depth and richness to the narrative.

Through his words, he explores themes such as identity, memory, and the human condition, inviting the reader to reflect on their own lives and experiences.

Overall, my first encounter with Orhan Pamuk was a truly memorable one, and I look forward to reading more of his works in the future.

"Neve" was released in 2002, but it was written between April 1999 and December 2001. This is significant due to what happened on September 11, 2001, an event that would mark the conscience of the West, or rather, the lack of conscience of the West towards the Middle East. After that, the media helped make the entire West an expert in terrorists, bombs, suicide attacks, extremism, poverty, and little more. To understand what we are talking about when we mention Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, the Kurds, the Sunnis, etc., one must read. And it is likely that the best reading to know is not the non-fiction written by journalists and historians with an outsider's view, but rather the fiction by novelists who were born there and feel what they are talking about. I say all this to make it clear that "Neve", being a magnificent book, requires an openness to political discussion and, above all, to the acceptance of the other.

Pamuk works from a magical-realist base, setting the events in a small town in the northwest of Turkey, Kars, which could well be imagined, but it is not. Kars exists, and given its border character, it has belonged to different regimes depending on the will of the times over the centuries. In the book, it serves as a stage for a typically Turkish city where secularism is debated, that is, the secular state against the religious state (it helps if we have some ideas about the country, linking the past drawn by Ataturk to the problems being lived now with Erdogan, or having images of films like those of Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Kazim Oz). The magical side emerges through the created framework, since almost everything happens during a great snowstorm that isolates the city, unleashing confusion among the factions - religious against secular, who in turn are divided into communists and nationalists - the inhabitants and the media that follow them. The media are fundamental here, first of all because the city's newspaper predicts the future, that is, it creates headlines of what will happen the next day.

Pamuk then uses the set scenario to unashamedly put his finger on the wound, making relevant attacks on the relationship between Europe (particularly Germany, which has been the great destination for many Turkish immigrants) and Turkey, between the State and Religion, talking about the position of women in different cultures, of suicide, of democracy, of journalism, of art, questioning prejudices and mental models of the reality that we all are building. Sometimes we almost feel as if Pamuk is pulling our ears, alerting us to the existence of another. But Pamuk does not just philosophize; all this is very well accompanied by measured doses of plot, loaded with crime, love, and passion.

The plot in the narration is particularly well structured, with a care for details that touches us. For example, the narrator always warns in advance if a character who enters the scene will die later, which generates in us a mixture of sensations, as if the author did not want to impress us with the surprise. On the other hand, when it comes to the networks of passions, Pamuk pulls the rug out from under us, plays with our emotions, surprises us, makes us angry. That is, the novel has a lot to say, but it does not limit itself to just saying it; it does so by emotionally involving the reader, binding him to that world, subjecting him to its needs. There is a melancholic touch emphasized by the snow and the isolation of the town and the lives of each character that characterize the atmosphere and make it very particular. Therefore, in the middle of the book and when out of its pages, we invariably find ourselves thinking "when will I return to Kars".
The writing is impressive, although like the theme, it is not to everyone's taste. Pamuk is quite verbose, and in that sense, he manages on the one hand to make me remember authors like Jonathan Franzen, but at the same time, and perhaps even more, Garcia Marquez and his Macondo, with all the verbosity mixed with all the constant action, plus all the characters and their blurring of reality. "Neve" functions like an unbeatable fable in which the protagonist, a poet who has just gone through a crisis of inspiration, starts writing again, but does not talk to us. He reaches us through a novelist who has the same name as Pamuk and who is writing a book about that poet. That is, "Neve" is a book of poems, within a book about the author of those poems. Yes, there is something postmodern here, but little. I would say that after the beautiful "My Name Is Red" (1998), Pamuk wanted to do something more classic, even if framed by postmodern artifices.
"If I were to enter a novel set in Kars, I would like to tell the reader not to believe anything written there about me or about the people of Kars. From a distance, no one can understand us."

Published in the VI (https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/...)

This was truly great.

I generally tend to avoid books that are predominantly plot-driven and have third-person narrations. Instead, I have a preference for first-person accounts that place more emphasis on the writing itself. However, this particular book was an absolute delight. The writing is sharp and clear, never becoming overly dense or overly flowery. I'm not entirely sure if this is due to the writer or the translator, but considering that Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize winner, it's probably the former.

The story is told through the eyes of the protagonist's friend, who is also named Orhan. He meticulously details the events that unfold when his friend Ka, a poet, returns to Turkey after spending 12 years in political exile in Germany. Ka has come back to report on the upcoming elections and the disturbing spate of suicides among young women in the city of Kars. While there, he conducts interviews with several people, including those who wish to take the city in a more religious direction and those who are supported by the state and aim to promote greater secularism. There is a group of girls who firmly refuse to remove their headscarves, which has led to tensions on both sides. Every day, it snows, and each chapter is drenched in the imagery of giant snowflakes and whiteness. Eventually, the city becomes cut off from the rest of the country, with regular blackouts adding to the chaos. This creates a rather nice, almost cozy sense of claustrophobia. It also provides the opportunity for a military coup to take place, with the leader being a famous actor who uses his position of power to stage performances that condemn the backwardness of Islam. Meanwhile, there is a handsome terrorist named Blue and a woman named Ipek, with whom Ka quickly falls in love.

The story takes place over a relatively short period of just three days, and the narrative is mostly chronological, with the exception of one chapter that jumps ahead in time. It flows extremely well, and I found it very easy to read. The themes of secularism, religion, art, beauty, and love may not be entirely new, but the story does an excellent job of drawing you in. I found some aspects of it a bit difficult to understand from a Western perspective, but I truly enjoyed reading the book and look forward to exploring more of Pamuk's work in the future.

For a long time, I received recommendations about Orhan Pamuk from different places, and his book "Snow" was often pointed out to me as the best of the best. That's why I decided to start with it.

After reading it, I was left with mixed impressions of the book.

My expectations were for something similar to the stories in Khaled Hosseini's books, but "Snow" is something completely different.

There is too much politics, too much religion here. At times, characters appear whose existence was not particularly interesting to me - and besides, the author's style is rather peculiar - which makes the book more difficult to read (there were 1-2 times when I almost gave up reading it).

The beginning was good with the description of the snow and Ka's arrival in the city - those moments I liked. After that, there was a long decline in the action until the events in the theater - and then there was a series of chapters that were exciting, and then there was a second decline that continued until the end, which, like the beginning of the book, I liked.

The most intriguing characters for me were Kadife and the Darkness - as I was curious to learn more details about him and have a slightly deeper insight into his life, but the author saved them.

3.5 ⭐

Ka is a Turkish poet exiled in Frankfurt. He is hired by a German editorial to go to Kars to investigate the high number of suicides among young women who refuse to live with their faces uncovered.

Upon arriving in Kars, under a snowstorm, he starts wandering around the city, questioning the families of the young suicidal women. The local authorities, as well as the religious sects, notice him and want to know the real reasons for his coming to the city.

He gets involved in politics and religion by mere chance and becomes a spy and mediator in a coup d'état conflict that occurs in the city, perpetrated by a group of actors who want to impose, by force of arms, the pro-Western policies.

Pamuk's descriptions are very interesting. He takes us on a tour of the Kars region in Turkey, in an attempt to understand how the characters moved before, during, and after the coup d'état, and to make known the way of life and customs of those peoples. The thoughts and words of the characters reveal the strong, fearless, and at the same time fragile and sensual character of both men and women. I believe this is the strong point of this novel, the knowledge I obtained from this reading, analysis, and investigation of Turkish culture.

Throughout the reading, I noticed that this novel reveals an internal conflict between two worlds: the West and the Arab world. Some fight for the Westernization of the country, while the ultra-nationalists fight for the religious and cultural continuity and openly say no to the Westernization of Turkey.

This cultural shock may be due to Pamuk, as a well-traveled man who has lived in the US for several years, knows and understands well his people, their culture, and their roots, as well as the Westernized way of life and culture.

This is the second book of Pamuk that I have read, and according to the author, Snow is his most political novel. I confess that I liked "My Name Is Red" more. It is more introspective, more reflective, more human.

This is the first book I have read from this Nobel Prize-winning author, and it is also the first book I have read about the political, social, and religious issues in Turkey.

Generally speaking, Middle Eastern literature has a special sense of closeness for me because we have common concerns.

The issue of religion and the hijab, which is a sensitive issue in Iran at the moment, is also prominent in the book.

Since Ataturk, Turkey has moved towards the separation of religion from politics (secularism) and modernization, while the radical Islamists have tried to enter the government. This is exactly the opposite of Iran.

In the book, the radical religious people support the Iranian revolution and those who are in pursuit of equal rights for men and women do not want to find a situation similar to Iran.

The conflict between these two groups leads to a coup in one of the mountainous border cities in the middle of a snowy winter.

What I have understood is that fanatical and radical religious people are always in pursuit of killing their opponents, and they consider this as a necessary thing based on their religion, which makes it very dangerous for society.

The issue of the hijab, starting from the removal of the headscarf, is also the main theme of the story.

I don't know to what extent the events and the coup are real, but the common concerns are very touching for me.

This novel has won a plethora of prizes and has received thunderous international acclaim for the manner in which it tackles the "clash of the Islamic fundamentalist East & secular West while maintaining the humanity of its characters." However, I firmly disagree.

The book commences quite well, but then it deteriorates into this truly peculiar stream-of-consciousness frenzy that feels like a feverish dream and makes little sense of the events towards the end. Additionally, the narrator persistently告知 you what is going to occur – significant things like deaths, etc. – and rather than focusing me and preventing me from being distracted by wondering what would happen, it had the exact opposite effect. I ultimately resorted to skimming the last third as I was so exasperated with how all the plot tension had vanished, the protagonist was rapidly transforming into a whiny annoyance, and – here lies my main grievance – there were no poems. Ka's entire character hinges on the fact that he has been blocked for all his years in the West, and when he returns "home," he experiences a surge of nineteen poems that simply pour out of him. A great deal of time is dedicated to discussing and dissecting them, but since the green notebook in which he wrote them is never located, we never actually get to read them. I consider this to be a cheap, feeble, cheating literary trick that shirks responsibility. The plot structure could even have accommodated the printing of at least one poem, but why couldn't Pamuk have done even that?

The one thing that did strike me was listening to the characters grappling with the concept of God and His relationship to life, yet even that was presented as either fanaticism or a mental salve for miserable individuals – nothing joyous or life-affirming.

I generally have a decent relationship with metafiction. However, throughout this entire work, I continuously questioned its applications here and eagerly awaited a payoff that unfortunately never materialized. If anything, the metafictional elements seemed to undermine both the suspense and the revelations, and I highly doubt that was the author's original intention. The doubling of certain characters also didn't strike me as particularly beneficial. But perhaps that's because I tend to get irritated (and bored) with characters who instantly fall in love with someone else's beauty and then obsess over it constantly. Due to the doubling of the characters, I was twice as exasperated (and bored) with this aspect.

One of the blurbs characterizes this as a "political novel," and that might be another one of my concerns. I am aware that all novels are political to some extent, but I don't easily engage with the political over the personal in novels, especially when the political leans towards fanaticism, even if a work purports to present both sides. I understand that this isn't a story of "reality" - as Ka's way of writing his poems demonstrates. I recognize the novel's absurdity - it had a Kafkaesque feel in the beginning; I also thought of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. But that also isn't always to my liking and likely has a great deal to do with why I didn't fully connect with this book.

The writing itself is quite good, and that's the reason I was able to persevere and keep reading. I noticed the several references to Russian writers and their novels (which might have been the most enjoyable part for me while reading this), but I'm not sure why they are included.

(3.5) This novel appears to revolve around an intricate play on words. It is set in Kars, a Turkish town where the protagonist, a poet known by the initials Ka, gets trapped by the snow (Kar in Turkish). Ka has returned to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany for his mother's funeral. While there, he decides to look into a recent series of female suicides, keep an eye on the upcoming election, and see if he can win the love of Ipek, an old friend and the daughter of the owner of the Snow Palace Hotel where he is staying. There is a touch of magic realism in the novel: the newspaper covered Ka's reading of a poem called “Snow” before he even wrote it. He and Ipek witness the shooting of the director of the Institute of Education – an attempted assassination in revenge for him banning girls who wear headscarves from the schools.

As in Elif Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve, the focus is on Turkey's split personality: a choice between fundamentalism (= East, poverty) and secularism (= West, wealth). Pamuk is rather heavy-handed with these rival ideologies and with the symbolism of the snow. By the time I reached page 165, having skimmed perhaps two chapters along the way, I couldn't stand to continue. However, if I receive a recommendation for a shorter and more nuanced Pamuk novel, I would give him another chance, and I did enjoy the various nice quotes about snow (reminding me of Joyce's “The Dead”) – it was truly atmospheric for this time of year.

A favorite line:

“That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.”

I think I liked everything in this novel.

The style: It delves deeply into the novel in short chapters, each with a main title and a secondary subtitle derived from the chapter's own dialogues. Orhan Pamuk himself intervenes in some parts of the novel as the friend of the protagonist, and he is conducting a search for the days of his friend Ka in Kars. The story starts slowly, but soon the events escalate and the excitement increases. As the story develops, you feel that there are more surprises in each chapter. Pamuk is able to maintain my interest in this story until the end.

The story: It has an emotional side through the love story of Ka and Ipek. It also has a political and social side, such as the investigation into the suicides of girls in Kars, a murder case, the loss of Ka's notebook of poems, and whether Ka was guilty of reporting Kerem (Blue). It also has a political side that reflects the conflicts between Islamists and secularists, and the Kurds and Armenians, who all want to have a voice and an opinion that reaches the world, as seen in the secret meeting scene in the Asia Hotel. But this conflict reaches its peak when a theater group stages a bloody military coup to prevent the Islamists from winning the local elections. The coup lasts for three long days in Kars, which is snowed in and cut off from the rest of the world. The novel describes how some symbols of Islam become political symbols, such as the headscarf, and become a tool in the political struggle. It also has a spiritual/religious side through questions about the meaning of a person's ability to believe in God in Turkey without it being to the extent of belonging to a group, about the meaning of the love of God, and about the place where there is no God.

This set of topics may seem like a lot for one novel, and perhaps this point in particular has attracted some criticism of the novel, but I found it acceptable and convincing in the novel.

I read the novel in the winter, and I read some passages of it while contemplating the snow in the Lebanese mountains.

“It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

My initial foray into the territory of Pamuk, Snow is a captivating book. It tells the story of an exiled poet who returns to his hometown under the guise of writing a journalistic article about a suicide epidemic. In his hometown of Kars, the poet is confronted with snow, a snowfall that forever alters his perspective.

A blizzard rages, a military coup unfolds, a theatrical massacre occurs, and there are encounters with love and betrayal. Violent fundamentalists and their pride add to the complex tapestry of the story. And at the heart of it all, there is a man who discovers poetry within himself.

Here we have a book filled with a plethora of events. It may not be a fast-paced read from the outset, as it takes time to build momentum. However, once it does, the drama and the surge of events catch you completely off-guard. In hindsight, considering the recent failed coup in Turkey in 2016, the book holds great relevance. At times, I found the drama to be a bit overwhelming, and some of the scenes had an absurdist element that didn't seem entirely natural for Pamuk. Nevertheless, I still found the book to be a refreshing and engaging read. I eagerly look forward to delving into more of the writer's works.

“It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

I finished reading the first book that came to Ulaanbaatar.

Country, dynasty, love, and many other elements of human existence. The author intertwined all of them evenly without emphasizing any one aspect, resulting in a single thought of "otherness."

I also started reading a novel by a Turkish writer, which was recommended by the Nobel Committee. However, I couldn't finish it quickly and ended up reading it for about 20 months due to various distractions...

Footnote: https://medium.com/@iBold/%D1%8D%D1%8...