5 "provocative, desolate, yearnful" stars !!!


10th Favorite Read of 2017 (tie)


To read Snow is to embark on an emotional journey where one laughs loudly and cries quietly.


Kars, a small city in northeast Turkey, has a rich history. It was once a place of glory, having been conquered multiple times over the centuries. Today, it is a backwater with a diverse population including Turks, Kurds, Azeris, and a few Russians. Most of the men are unemployed, spending their days in teahouses, engaged in discussions about politics and religion. Their demoralized state leads them to oppress their women and children.


Ka, a Turkish-descent poet living in Frankfurt as a political exile, comes to Kars to investigate the suicides of young Muslim women for a German newspaper. He soon finds himself embroiled in a world that was once familiar but now seems so foreign. He is both revered and disdained by the townspeople. Moreover, he falls madly in love with Ipek, an old college friend who is separated from her husband, a mayoral candidate. The plot unfolds in a complex and farcical manner, not just in a funny way but in a convoluted way that delves into the nature of identity, ethnic strife, fundamentalism, poverty, and gender relations. So much happens within just three days, and as the reader, you can feel the sadness and despair seeping into your being, along with moments of guffaws at the ridiculousness of men trying to make sense of their world and a sense of fear for the women who are striving to survive and be safe.


The story is complex and beautiful, making you reflect on your own existence and wonder if you are truly living the fullest life possible.


I eagerly look forward to reading more of Mr. Pamuk's work.

To have two abandoned books in one evening is truly not a pleasant experience. In fact, this has never occurred to me before.

However, I simply had no interest in this book whatsoever and merely skimmed through it. The concept of this individual named Ka, a renowned poet, who travels to Kars to report on the elections and simultaneously investigate the girls who commit suicide, struck me as rather strange. When I reached Chapter 8, titled "Girls Who Commit Suicide are not Even Muslims", that was the final straw for me.

In my view, there were words scattered randomly throughout the pages, lacking any meaningful or substantial content. By the time I reached the end, I questioned whether I needed to subject myself to such torture. The answer was a resounding no. So, it was promptly consigned to the "cloud".

I am aware that Mr Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 and is regarded as "one of the freshest, most original voices in contemporary fiction". Well, we all have our own reading preferences in life, and that is my justification for abandoning this book.

Another exceptional book by Pamuk has once again left me truly impressed. The themes explored within its pages are not only thought-provoking but also deeply engaging. Pamuk has a remarkable ability to delve into the human psyche and society, presenting complex ideas in a way that is both accessible and profound.

The writing itself is of the highest caliber. His prose is rich, vivid, and descriptive, painting a detailed picture that allows the reader to fully immerse themselves in the story. Each sentence is crafted with care, and the pacing is perfect, keeping the reader hooked from beginning to end.

Overall, this book is a testament to Pamuk's talent as a writer. It is a must-read for anyone who appreciates great literature and wants to explore the depths of the human experience. I cannot wait to see what he has in store for us next.

I read outstanding reviews here

which firmly convinced me that I can scarcely add anything new. However, being a Muslim and an Arab, I was able to sense a great deal of the depth of this book. It presented Turkey with a brutally honest yet caring anatomy, and even the brilliant sarcasm made it all the more painful. Regarding this fictional book as a novel and useful approach for me to understand wounds that are not so far different from ours, I will pen down my thoughts.

For me, it is a magnificent novel, one that is truly heart-breaking. It delves into the contemporary Turkish conflict between political Islam, tradition, and on an even larger scale, the national identity on one side, and secularism, modernization, and westernization on the other. This conflict is vividly portrayed in the novel by fanatics from both camps, resulting in a complete bloody chaos, with poverty and unemployment serving as the main catalysts for its continuation. But this analysis, which is carried out through both political and philosophical methods, is not dry. It is palpable through the characters, their lives, and the darkness they endured during three days of extreme isolation. Yes, the main events unfold within just three days! So, the novel has a slow and melancholic melody, yet it is filled with unexpected twists.

Orhan, almost taking no sides, no right or wrong, allows me to form my own assumptions and attempt to answer the unanswered questions.

Orhan is not an easy read. I often paused during his intellectual conversations, doing my utmost to understand. I adored his characters with their human weaknesses, confusions, and passions. I will never forget Ka with his loneliness, desperation, regrets, and his sad love story, or his words: “Here I am, abandoned and wasting away. I carry the scars of unbearable suffering on every inch of my body. Sometimes I believe it’s not just you I’ve lost, but everything in the world.”

I simply cannot stop thinking about Blue! How much he angered and confused me! His statement: “When the Ayatollah Khomeini said that (the most important thing today is not to pray or fast but to protect the Islamic faith) I believed him” may shed light on the vast range of confusing contradictions regarding how a religion can be manipulated. I could neither completely hate him nor avoid feeling sorry for his destiny, due to the blurring facts surrounding him that lead to the uncertainty about the other side of any coin.

And above all, I will continue to wonder about Ipek and Kadife, their strange relationship, and the feminine role in general, bearing in mind that the suicide girls are a central debate in this novel.

I believe this novel will remain with me for a long time, constantly making me wonder and perhaps even cry.

**An Aorist Country**

Religion is seldom just about dogma or belief. Instead, it is almost always about being a member of a group and the sense of belonging it generates. "Snow" is an absurdist novel that delves into religion as a community and the conflicts that arise within it.

The protagonist, Ka, is a thirty-something who finds himself in a blizzard, in love, in a paranoid state, and in the middle of a local revolution started by a provincial theatre-group. This forms his isolated yet god-like, omniscient community: "In Kars everyone always knows about everything that’s going on."
However, Kars, located in Eastern Turkey, is far from being a single community. Its history is a complex blend of Russian, Iranian, Ottoman, and even a touch of English. Its inhabitants include Kurds, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, and Turks. And among the ethnic Turks, there are as many communities as there are distinct interpretations of Islam.
Each of these communities, according to their members, is created by God. Different physical aspects of the Karsian world evoke God for the various communities. For instance, "Snow reminds Ka of God!" especially its silence. But this is his community mainly because after living as an emigre in Germany for so many years, he has no other. In Kars, he finds solace mainly because he has discovered empathy "with someone weaker than himself," namely the poor, uneducated, and confused provincial Turkish folk. But that's not how the locals see it.
The locals have a diverse range of religious communities to choose from, spanning from radical Islam to secularist atheism. The latter term is not one of belief but of membership: "...that word doesn’t refer to people who don’t believe in God: it refers to the lonely ones, the people whom the gods have abandoned." That is, those who have no community.
Most of the local communities have a common enemy - the state. Since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the state has tried to replace rather than include local communities within itself. But it is merely a source of what we now know in the age of Trump as 'fake news.' Moreover, like in the Trumpian era, the state is an aspiring religion, with the sovereign power that all other religions desire. It uses this power and legal violence to present a binary choice to the population: 'My Fatherland or My Headscarf.'
The intractable conflict resulting from this situation is not new in Turkey (or in America for that matter). It existed even in the Empire. Pamuk expresses this through constant historical flashbacks and frequent narrative references like 'later I found out' or 'eventually we learned.' But he also captures the repetitive nature of Turkish life through an ingenious literary technique that may not be precisely rendered in English.
Like Classical Greek, Turkish has a verb form, the Aorist or Habitual, which, although expressed in English, is not explicit. The Aorist aspect implies timeless repetition, connoting the past, future, and present. The sense of the Aorist can be simply shown in the crude English expression 'shit happens.' It doesn't just occur now; it has always happened and always will. Turkey is the ancient, impoverished, embattled city of Kars, writ large, with its "endless wars, rebellions, massacres, and atrocities." Shit just keeps happening.
The American version of this has not been written yet, but it is long overdue.

This book is written in a gorgeously hypnotic style, yet perhaps it is a bit too long. Snow pervades the entire book, and Pamuk's descriptions have a remarkable effect. It's like when we notice that it is snowing slightly outside, we get a small, pleasurable jolt of surprise that briefly pulls us away from the action. There is indeed a great deal of action. The characters are trapped in the city of Kars, which serves as an effective external mechanism, putting pressure on them to act and interact.

The book starts to become really interesting fairly early on, let's say in Chapter 5. At this point, we switch from Ka's perspective to a recording of a man who we know, prior to reading the chapter, has died. Thus, we are privy to their final conversation. This chapter is truly riveting, and the dialogue is even starker because we know the end result. The plot thickens at various points in a manner that is reminiscent of Crime and Punishment. The same characters keep crossing paths, either intentionally or otherwise, and their conversations give the feel of something larger, representing ideas and movements rather than just individuals' concerns.

I have to admit that the novel became challenging for me to follow at times, especially without viscerally feeling exactly what was at stake in whether or not a Turkish woman chooses to wear a scarf. That is, while I can understand the intellectual debate that Pamuk is staging, it requires a bit of a leap of faith to feel its urgency, unlike Crime and Punishment, where the murder and the ensuing moral debates don't seem to depend on the same degree of prior cultural background or knowledge. Or maybe they do, but in that case, I have the prior knowledge. Overall, this book, despite its flaws, was nonetheless enjoyable for the majority of the reading. There is a wonderful, lovely simplicity to the language, as if the very pages themselves are mirrors catching the snowflakes that flutter amidst nearly every scene.

To historia iście kafkowska. The very name that the main character uses has something Kafkaesque. He is called Ka, and thus it is close to Josef K.

The hero of the snow, like the hero of Kafka's "The Castle", arrives on his own business, but is carried away by the current of events. Ka tries to realize his plans, makes his own decisions, but Kars, the city he has reached, draws him in deeper and deeper, as if taking away his subjectivity.

In this drawing in, the city is extremely intense and consistent, which at first seemed unrealistic to me, because how is it that on the first day of his stay Ka gets to know almost all the most important people in the city, even those who have been hiding for years and whom the special services cannot trace. But such is Kars, strange, gothic, even magical, because in what city does a newspaper printed on Tuesday describe events that will take place on Wednesday?

Only this is the first level. The second is the brilliantly shown problem of the collision of the secular world with the religious, fundamentalist one, the liberal world with the conservative one. And can we talk here about a collision or a connection between these worlds?

Never, in any report, has anyone shown me this problem from so many sides, has not provoked as much thought on this topic as Pamuk in "Snow".

Interestingly, in this context, while reading, I often thought of Poland.

I highly recommend it wholeheartedly.

**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, a Turkish poet, is traveling by bus to Kars, a small city in northeastern Turkey. The snow outside is falling relentlessly, and he falls asleep. Ka, or Kerim Alakuşoğlu, has been in Frankfurt, Germany for 12 years. He is a 42-year-old unmarried man who has not written poems for four years. He takes refuge in the library, where he can find enough books for “twenty lifetimes”. He especially likes Turgenev, the Russian writer. He doesn't bother much learning German as “my body resisted the German language”. But he meets with fellow Turks. Ka has two fears in his life: the fear of not being natural and the fear of writing bad poems.

He considers himself a political exile in Germany, a “correct and sad” man like the heroes of Chekhov, and someone who likes solitude. Ka was condemned for an article he didn't write. After the military coup in Turkey, he fled to Germany. His mother died, and he had to return to Istanbul. Then he decides to go to Kars, hoping to find beautiful İpek and ask her to marry him. İpek attended college with Ka but then got married.

Ka will stay in Kars for three days, where 40% of the population is Kurdish. While strolling around the city, he notices that the cafes are filled with unemployed Kurds. It's a deserted-looking city yet full of history, including the Russian period and the time when some Armenians were rich. You can still see the millenarian Armenian churches there. There are billboards in Kars saying: ”The Human Being is a masterpiece of God, suicide is an insult”. The suicide rate in Kars is four times above the world average, and the reasons are complex, including premeditation and women being manipulated.
In Kars, Ka meets İpek Hanim, who has been divorced. She is the daughter of the hotel manager where Ka is staying. They talk about their mothers who died. While they are talking in a café, a religiously motivated homicide takes place in front of them. One of the murderer's motives is related to the question of whether women should cover their heads and faces. İpek's father is a communist, and one of the candidates in the local elections is Muhtar Bei, who wants to re-marry İpek. İpek's sister is a militant of the Islamic veil.
One day, Ka talks to Muhtar at the party's office. Muhtar admires the snow show outside. Ka marvels at the grace and tranquilizing force of the snow; its silence gets him closer to God. This is truly a political novel, and Ka, who never got interested in politics before, is about to be dragged into it. The issues in the novel are still relevant in Turkey today, such as freedom of the press, religion, and the rule of law.

Snow is a novel that begins with a disturbing fact. Many veiled girls in the city of Kars in Turkey have committed suicide. This prompts a poet named Ka (Kerim) from Frankfurt to travel to Kars and conduct an investigative report. Why has the suicide rate increased so significantly? Apparently, the pressure from the Turkish government to ban the hijab in schools has led to this increase. Now, religious institutions are plastered with posters proclaiming that suicide is a sin. However, strange things start to happen. The principal of the main school in the city is killed, and there are other such incidents. A group of secularists in the city stage protests against Islamists, and the city is in a state of military lockdown. The central government cannot come to the city due to heavy snow. Ka is left stranded in a hotel where he meets İpek, a divorced woman who was his former classmate. İpek's sister, Kadife, is the opposite of her. She is veiled and insists on wearing the hijab, considering herself a "political Muslim." There are different social groups in the city: Islamists, Kurdish separatists, secularists, and a small group like İpek's father and Kadife who are left-wing atheists. Kars is a city close to Iran, Armenia, and Russia, with a unique location and even its architecture shows Russian and Armenian influences.

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate in 2006, wrote this novel over three years in 2001, and its English translation was selected as one of the 100 best books of The New York Times in 2004. According to Pamuk himself, this is his first and last political novel. Like many of his other works, his main concern is the unresolved conflict between tradition and modernization in Turkey. Pamuk is aware of the complexity and confusion of different elements in society and the multiplicity of events. He understands history well and is knowledgeable about the complexity and diversity of traditional and modern ideas.
The narrative style of Pamuk is postmodern. The narrator of the story is Orhan, that is, Pamuk himself. He is a close friend of Ka. After four years, Ka is traumatized in Germany, and all the poems he wrote during his stay in Kars have been stolen. Now the narrative is completely uncertain, and the narrator injects his own speculations into the story. The psychological complexity of the characters reminds me of the complexity of the characters in Dostoyevsky's novels. In this narrative, like his other stories, he does not try to innovate in a special way but tries to tell the story from an uncertain perspective.
I remember when I first read Pamuk's work, I noticed many similarities between Turkey and Iran. The political situation in Iran never leads to a peaceful resolution, and the Shah never falls. Eventually, it becomes something similar to Turkey. A country that has protests every few years, political prisoners at will, an almost 100% inflation rate, ethnic diversity, and the constant threat of separatism. This novel, like Pamuk's other works, reminds me that society and the social structure are involved in a complex historical event. It is simplistic to hope for a miraculous improvement with some radical changes. Many reforms are like jumping from one pit to another.
Compared to the other three works of Pamuk that I have read, this novel uses fewer symbols and fewer strange narrators (for example, in "My Name Is Red," there are narrators like a corpse and a dog). However, the storytelling is more prominent in this story. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it is so engaging that one cannot say more about this story because it would spoil the plot. But we can see that the issue is both about the hijab and not just about the hijab. And what a strange scene it is when Kadife is forced to reveal her hijab on the stage of the theater, and the gun that is supposed to be empty, which is part of the play, but the reality is something else.

I have to say, it has been quite some time since I have liked a novel as much as this one. And it has been even longer since I've had the opportunity to lie on a beach and read for a whole week. So, I will say that you may want to take this review with a grain of sand.

Pamuk reminded me of what truly defines a novel. It's not just a series of events but rather the creation of a world. And Pamuk's Kars is indeed its own unique world, filled with characters whose level of nuance is as deep as those in a real place. In life, we don't know everyone intimately, and it should be the same in a novel.

But if what makes a novel a novel is the creation of a world, then what makes a novel good is the establishment of a tone, a space, and a way of seeing the world that extends beyond the pages. It is this quality that I truly adored. It's difficult to describe, and I think the Russians do it best, especially Gogol. However, Pamuk constantly maintains a humorous sadness that is neither overly light nor depressing. I'm sure there is a word for this in some language, but it is complete and it made me forget that I was reading at many points.

Nevertheless, it is also distinct enough that I can understand how not everyone would love it. You have to read for the humor, embrace the poetry (and I don't mean a veiled language reference, but the actual poetry in the text), and take the characters seriously enough to care but not to mourn. So maybe, just to indulge my inner English teacher one more time, what makes a novel great is also this quality - it must be singular enough to be disliked and good enough to be loved.

Eccomi qui, after some time has passed, reading a book by Pamuk once again. The white, the candor, the purity of the snowflakes that fall contrast sharply with the murders, the hatred, and the girls who commit suicide because they are forced to remove their veils to enter the university in Kars, a town on the border between Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia.

It is precisely in Kars that Ka arrives, a poet in a profound spiritual and existential crisis, who has been in political exile in Germany, in Frankfurt, for 12 years, to write a report on the events that unfold here and to find a glimmer, a chink of happiness, also thanks to Ipek, the woman he loves.

Thanks to Pamuk for the beauty of his words and for the stories he tells, thanks for making me know a world that is both far away and at the same time close.

A useful approach to kick-starting a book discussion is to pose the question ‘What was this novel about?’. Ideally, a few major themes will surface. Here, however, multiple intertwined motifs ensure a diversity of opinions nearly as extensive as the readership.

Let's commence with romantic obsession. Ka, a Turkish poet of moderate achievement, confesses to İpek that he returned to Kars upon learning of her divorce, with the intention of marrying her. The chief allure is her breathtaking beauty. His determination heightens over three snowbound days. As for İpek, the situation is complex. We infer from her ambiguous remarks that, in her mind, love and happiness have quite distinct meanings.

Nostalgia recurs in passages such as this: “As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler [Ka] fell into a long-desired, long awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world.” (p.4)

Ka's delusions seem so real to him. He is convinced that he will marry İpek, and they will relocate back to Frankfurt, where he has spent the past 12 years in political exile. The innocence he experiences is divorced from his growing resolve to do whatever it takes to secure what he believes is his sole opportunity for lasting happiness. When Kadife, İpek’s younger sister, observes “’Doing the right thing doesn’t always end in happiness.’” Ka counters: “’The right thing is the thing that makes us happy.’” (p.332) Throughout the novel, Ka’s pronouncements waver. Does he truly believe everything he says?

Kadife is in love with Blue, a radical Islamist. Blue inadvertently stumbles upon a truth during a tirade to Ka about the West. He accuses Ka of being infected by Western culture and of attempting to spread that infection in Turkey. “I’m not angry at you, because, like all good people, you are not aware of the evil inside you. But having heard it from me, you can’t claim to be an innocent from now on.” (p.236)

In this world, personal identity has a disconcerting fluidity. The occasional narrator (“Orhan”) is Ka’s close friend. He travels to Kars and interviews the people Ka encountered. “…[A]s I walked the streets of Kars, talking to the same people Ka had talked to, sitting in the same teahouses, there had been many moments when I almost felt I was Kar.” (p.411) Similarly, Fazıl, a religious high school student, feels connected to his recently deceased friend Nacip. “My friend was at my side again; he was inside me. It’s just as they say in the old books. The soul leaves the body six hours after death….But Necip’s soul decided to enter my body instead.” (p.285)

Pamuk immerses the reader in a surreal reality. Newspapers print tomorrow’s news today – news the government desires to hear. Beliefs are ephemeral mirages, reconstituted fragments of history and rumor. Blue complains “because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West we’ve forgotten our own stories.” (p.78) However, the story he cites is actually a Persian epic written in the 10th or 11th century. Armenians, Russians, Ottomen, secular Turks, Kurds, and Circassians have all passed through the country, leaving cultural traces and reminders of their presence in the decaying architecture. Yet, they are conveniently erased from the shifting nationalist mythologies of competing political camps.

Kadife observes: “In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the ones that comes with their beliefs.” (p.312) These beliefs are founded on a basis of pride and shame rather than fact.

Orhan Pamuk is labeled a post-modernist writer. I question whether that term still holds significance. His writing is entirely accessible. He employs familiar literary devices of suspense and witty ironic humor. The dramatic pacing is meticulously controlled. Finally, the surreal reality he portrays feels all too familiar. He immerses us in a Turkish reality, but the abstract contradictions feel painfully contemporary and universal.