Snow | Orhan Pamuk | A Modern Tragedy

Snow | Orhan Pamuk | Melancholy but moving...

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Snow

	Snow Orhan Pamuk Vintage, 2005 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 135 reviews view larger image
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A Modern Tragedy

The modern day friction between western ideals and fundamentalist Islam theology is presented by both the media and bloggers in simplistic "black and white" terms. Many stereotypes have risen because most readers still get both their information and their opinions from these sources. One side portrays the followers of Jihad as ignorant, excessively misogynist, undemocratic, and hateful. The other side believes that Westerners are materialistic, militaristic, heodonistic, and deserving of the 911 attacks.

Pamuk's novel provides us with a sane story of this strife. Unlike the stereotype in the media and blogger world, this takes place in the snow, not in the desert.

Pamuk takes time and care to develop the humanity of all the characters regardless of their side.

But, despite the wisdom that comes from this novel it is about a tragedy for all sides, and in this, it is a close parallel to the inevitable tragedy that all sides face today. The friction and the violence comes from the universal weakness of all human character regardless of birth or belief.

We should read this because the people who are on "the other side" are the people that we do not know. We do not have a relationship with them.

Pamuk helps us to build relationships with these strangers while at the same time, we are able to hold the values that we have always held dear. Yes, both sides have their manipulative leaders who use and abuse the friction to enhance their power. In the end, these leaders are cut from the same cloth regardless of their side. For, the rest of us who are not in positions of power, we pursue the ideas and thoughts that we believe will give the most meaning to our lives.

This book's truths extend beyond Turkey's borders, and unhappily its tragedy will never end.

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Melancholy but moving...

A Turkish poet from Istanbul, who spent 12 years in political exile in Germany, returns to a small Turkish town after an old newspaper friend asks him to report on the impending municipal elections and to investigate a large number of suicides by "head-scarf" young girls who have been barred from university for covering their hair. He is also pulled to this town to reconnect with a beautiful girl whom he knew as a youth. The poet gets caught in a political struggle in this poverty stricken town - a battle between Kurdish separatists, East and West and political Islamists. The political aspects of the plot twist and turn and at times can be very difficult to follow but Pamuk's vivid picture of this desolate and long forgotten part of the world, the struggle of warring ideologies, Ka's yearning to make a connection with Ipek - all make this beautiful, sad & melancholy book worth reading.

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"They'll never be modern!"

Orhan Pamuk's homeland of Turkey suffers the abrasions of existing as the rift between the tectonic plates of the Eastern and Western worlds. Snow principally succeeds in analyzing this tension; the local politics and the love story are coincidental. A grouping of epigraphs pinpoint the novel's main sentiment: "The Westerner in me was discomposed," from Joseph Conrad, and "Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people," from Dostoevsky.

The conflict of the novel is embodied in the poet Ka's return to his Turkish home city from Germany. Central to Ka's struggle lies religion: "As Ka knew from the beginning, in this part of the world faith in God was not something achieved by thinking sublime thoughts and stretching one's creative powers to their outer limits; nor was it something one could do alone; above all it meant joining a mosque, becoming part of a community. Nevertheless, Ka was still disappointed that Muhtar could talk so much about his group without once mentioning God or his own private faith. He despised Muhtar for it." Pamuk's characters refresh the tired battle between atheists and fervent believers.

Ka's visit to the economically and spiritually depressed Kars is strangely enchanted. The city is blanketed in snow (a reiterated image) and awash in blinding whiteness. "It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. They fell silent for a while." Rather than simply a sign of renewal or redemption for the town, the oppressive weather signifies a carnivalesque period. In a brilliant ironic twist, the roads are all closed and the town falls to a takeover by a "coup-de-theatre." Nationalistic actors and a few soldiers stage a play in which an actress removes her head scarf - not to cleanse it as the audience expects - but to burn it in an act of defiance. Religious youths in the crowd become boisterous and protest this blatant offense against Islam, only to witness some soldiers/actors fire rounds into the crowd. Based on the premise of the theater and a play being performed, the audience is slow to comprehend that the guns have shot actual rounds, killing nearly a dozen people. This section is a striking depiction of political upstarts, using the theatricality of the event to point to the absurd events. During the last performance by the troupe, the leader Sunay is shot, lamenting, "How stupid all this is! They know nothing about modern art, they'll never be modern!"

My expectations may have been inflated with the knowledge that Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk displays ingenious marks of the great Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Snow openly wrestles with ideas of freedom, religion, and humanity by employing similar techniques as Brothers Karamazov. Instead of the Grand Inquisition, we have Muhtar preaching on the tragic loss of identity in the East: `"But I didn't tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it's forgotten. This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi's Shehname. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart--from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon--and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus' murder of his father and Macbeth's obsession with power and death speak to the people throughout the Western world. But now, because we've fallen under the spell of the West, we've forgotten our own stories...How do you explain this?"

Ka's poetry is incredibly intriguing. Nowhere do we receive more than several lines of his highly esteemed work. Instead, the reader is provided with notes from his journal and an interesting geometric figure - a six-pointed snowflake representative of his newest collection of poetry. Upon visiting Kars, his writing drought ends and a bevy of new poems results from the landscape, his conversations with others about God, religion, and love. The axes of this diagram are labeled "Memory, Imagination and Reason." It is at these termini that he organizes his poems into different groups and establishes the relationships between them. At the center is the seminal poem, "I, Ka," which is his European manifesto of individualism. Ka's solipsistic wandering across town and poetical musing, his attempt to possess a beautiful woman rather than love her, and the narrator's devotion to having his story told leave the reader wondering what else would Ka expect?

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