This is going to be a rant, even more so because this book is written by Nobel Prize Winner, honored for how he represents Turkey in his books. It made the NY Times Best Books for 2004. Where is the saving grace of this piece of junk trying to pass itself as a novel?Ka, the pompous main character is probably the vilest creation I've come across in a while. That's an achievement, given how much I dislike most protagonists. This idiot is an exile, who comes back to Turkey for his mother's funeral. Once that is done, he reveals his utter selfishness, and decides to travel to Kars. He has noble intentions - to write about some election that no one cares about and to examine the string of suicides among Karsian women. But his all-encompassing in-your-face obsession is Ipek, the beautiful woman who now lives in Kars, is single, and who Ka wants to marry without actually knowing her. Because you know, when your name is Ka, you think, "I can never fall in love with a woman unless I know nothing about her." He then proceeds to do everything in his power to fuck her, oops sorry, to "make love" to her, for example, sending her old father off to a potentially dangerous meeting with a known terrorist who he knows is being monitored by the state. But, what can you do, he's in love. And he will be so happy with Ipek, he just knows this! When they do "make love", Ipek looks a bit too confident - not fragile enough for our hero - so he hurts her. She, being the idiot masturbation fantasy (for the author as much as the characters, he even admits it in the novel) that she is, enjoys the fuck out of it. From there the plot devolves into utter stupidity, surprising me as to the depths it could sink to, considering how low it was to begin with. It's definitely deeper than the "true love" referred to in this book. Pamuk introduces issues very early in the novel - covered girls, poverty, Islamist political movement, the craziness of the state, suicide. But these are just for show, and to build up to the 436 pages (in my edition) of the novel. Every time someone begins to talk about the issues, and gets in about two lines, the author cuts to Ka, who is daydreaming about the many ways he can fuck Ipek instead of following the conversation. If the main character does not think that any of these issues are interesting, why should I, the reader, care? In any case, Pamuk barely scratches the surface of the rich material available to him. For example, twice he paints himself into a corner pertaining to a covered girl's faith, and twice he uses the same out - I am not going to discuss my faith with an atheist! Pamuk cleverly does not write a theist who could drag this explanation out. As for the suicides, that's just a frame. No one bothers with it after Ka does some initial half-hearted investigation, apparently no girl decides to bother with suicide while he's there. Some investigative journalist he would make too - a more incurious literary journalist you'd be hard pressed to find. He just blows with the wind, and stops the would-be interesting plot routinely at least twice in a paragraph for the following reasons in any order: 1. How beautiful Ipek is! How much he loves her! How they'll be happy in Frankfurt!2. How beautiful the snow is! I can hear the silence of God in it for the first 200 pages of the book! After that I'll conveniently forget that I had any dilemma about God. But, even then, the snow is so fucking beautiful!3. Hold your military coup for a freaking minute! My brain is like an incontinent bladder and it's leaking a poem! Go boil your heads for ten minutes while I scribble this down!4. Isn't my poem beautiful? Isn't it really beautiful? I'll put it down on the memory axis of my nice little snowflake, leaning towards the imagination axis. (Authors Note to the Readers: Suckers! Ka lost the poems!!!! I'll waste 300 pages carping about his poems, but I'll refuse to include them in the novel. Nope, not even the one that I say I recovered from a TV program. You can all go fuck yourselves.)5. Ten minutes after 4, ah! Ipek doesn't love me! My poems don't come anymore! I want to die!! (Readers: Please go find a well, Ka. Ka ignores the readers, and goes back to 1 after spending a couple of lines on LE ISSUES!)To get back to the serious issues, even if Pamuk refuses to, women in this book are portrayed abominably. Also, shall I dare say this? They conform to every stereotype the non-Islamic world has about Islam and women. There are only two main girls in the book that supposedly deals with women: Ipek - the paragon who everyone is in love with, and Kadife - her sister, a covered girl intensely jealous of her sister. They ultimately establish the view that whether covered or bare headed, woman is objectified. What's more, she's ok with being treated the way she is. Everyone seems to fall in love with one woman after the other. Ka is indecisive to the point that several times he wonders if he might make out with Kadife while he's mentally masturbating to the image of Ipek. Ipek seems to have one trait: her beauty. She doesn't have any pride, no matter how horribly Ka treats her (or the terrorist Blue for that matter). Her only moment of decisiveness comes because of a man. There is a lot of lip service paid to the fact that Kadife is very respected because she chose to wear a head scarf, but all this is undone when it is revealed that she did it to get into bed with Blue. Blue is a player - he sleeps with Ipek, and then two-times her with Kadife, then two-times Kadife with a random girl who's supposedly her friend - and all this achieves is that the women share some kind of twisted bond. Even before that, when she supposedly stands in a room filled with men and is able to pronounce something provocative and win the respect of everyone, she can only do so because she's sleeping with Blue. And when Blue storms off in a snit, girl is completely traumatized and regrets everything she's said and is willing to do anything if only Blue would speak to her! Some role models these paragons are. There are so many glib pronouncements in the book that I would be quoting it in entirety if I were to comment on that. All the characters seem to be stuck at a mental age of four. But, I was disappointed even before I could read ten pages of this book with the poor language. I have no idea if it's something specific to Turkish writing or it lost something in the translation. These are some examples of what I'm talking about. Ka and Kadife are strolling around Kars talking about Blue, when Kadife says, "Everyone's afraid of him. We are too. These are the butcher shops." At another point, Ka is absolutely untroubled by the fact that he will fall in love with Ipek. In the next sentence he is filled with dread by the very same thing. If I made a drinking game of any of these words/phrases - "happy in Frankfurt", "Ipek...beautiful", "snow/snowflakes", "fallen in love with [insert female character of your choice]", "had a poem coming on" - I would have died by alcohol overdose midway through the book. I could expend more vitriol on the book, but I'm tired, and my head hurts, and I hope I never remember this book again.
Come, come again whoever, whatever you may beHeathen, fire-worshipper, sinful of idolatry, comeCome even if you broke your penitence a hundred times, comeOurs 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-tinglingly eerie about it. Listening to the haunting Sufi music while gazing at the richly caparisoned tombs, which were covered with cloths embroidered with gilded Kufic inscriptions and topped with enormous turbans, gave me a sense of being in a portal to another world. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was a famous Sufi poet, and that our bus tour stopped in Konya because his tomb complex, with its startlingly turquoise turret, was a must-see architectural jewel. Perhaps the long bus ride from Istanbul and the hot midday sun made me light-headed and open to suggestive experiences. I still don’t know.“I don’t like this place.” Someone spoke and startled me out of my reverie. It was Orhan, our Turkish guide. “Why?” I asked him.“No. Not the Mevlana. It’s this place, Konya. The people here are fanatics, I don’t like them.”Reflexively, I looked around the tomb; there were surprisingly few visitors aside from our group --- women in black chadors that I was told were Iranians, other tourists, Western and Asian, and a few Turkish men in western clothing. Some seemed to be praying, but others merely gaped at the tombs and the marvelously intricate decorations on the mausoleum’s walls.Orhan followed my gaze and said, “Do you know that they have tried to bomb this place several times?”“But why? Isn’t the Mevlana a famous Muslim saint?”“It’s because of this”, he pointed to the inscription on the wall. “The fanatics don’t like this so they want to destroy it. Come on, let’s get everyone back to the bus and get out of this place.”Three days later, we were in Canakkale, in a hotel full of sunbathing German tourists with a glorious view of the sparkling Dardanelles. Orhan was chatting up a few scantily clad Frauleins. We seemed to be light years away from Konya and Turkey’s dusty Anatolian heartland. I wondered what the ‘fanatics’ that Orhan spoke about thought of this place, and how they could share the same country with their more secular fellow citizens.Another Orhan, the Nobel Prize winner, tells us all about it in Snow. The setting is Kars, a border city that seems to be perpetually swathed in swirling snow, where Islamists, army-backed secularists, Kurdish militants and leftists have been grimly battling for supremacy since Ataturk’s times. We follow Ka, an exiled poet who is sent to Kars to write an article about suicides among headscarf wearing girls, who are forbidden to attend state schools and universities unless they unveil themselves. In a short time, Ka witnesses a military coup, an assassination, a play that ends up in a massacre, and meets the individuals who represent the main opposing factions: Blue the charismatic Islamist/terrorist, and Sunay Zaim the actor/politician/staunch secularist. We may suppose that the westernized Ka’s sympathy naturally lies with the secularists, but no; he is apolitical; his real reason for coming to Kars is to see Ipek, a woman whom he has hopes for. Ipek, who recently divorced Muhtar, the leader of a local Islamist party, lives with her father and younger sister, Kadife. Kadife, to her secularist father’s consternation, is known as the leader of the headscarf girls --- and also secretly Blue’s lover. Soon, Ka is drawn into a vortex of torture and murderous violence, and political as well as personal reasons eventually compel him to choose sides. Pamuk, who shares Ka’s westernized upbringing, presents the differing point of views even-handedly; all of the factions involved are equally dogmatic and violent. The Islamists kill in the name of religion, while the secularists do so in the name of the Turkish state. They both believe in a zero-sum game scenario in which even the slightest compromise is impossible. The result is a stark drama worthy of a Greek tragedy --- and indeed, the pivotal scenes of the story literally take place on the stage. The novel itself has a stagy quality; some of the dialogues feel like set pieces and some of the characters are barely three-dimensional. I occasionally found the insecure, ever doubtful Ka infuriating, especially in his pursuit of Ipek. Some sample dialogue:Ka: “You’re here this evening, aren’t you?”Ipek: “Yes.”Ka: “Because I want to read you my poem again”.Ka: “Do you think it’s beautiful?”Ipek: “Yes, really, it’s beautiful.”Ka: “What’s beautiful about it?”Ipek: “I don’t know, it’s just beautiful”Ka: “Did Muhtar ever read you a poem like this?”Ipek: “Never.”Ka began to read the poem aloud again, this time with growing force, but he still stopped at all the same places to ask, “Is it beautiful?” He also stopped at a few new places to say, “It really is very beautiful, isn’t it?”Ipek: Yes, it’s very beautiful!”Forget it, Ipek, you’ll never be happy with THIS guy.The story ends with a murderous finale, also on stage. Without spoiling it, I must say that I didn’t find the rationale for the murder to be wholly believable. I like how Pamuk subtly presents the issues in this book, which are important and unfortunately increasingly relevant to the lives of many people, both in the East and the West, but I don’t really care for the characters and how their stories are told. Pamuk never wholly convince me that these are real human beings instead of stage actors who must act the story. Otherwise, this shall be a solid 4 star book.
What do You think about Snow (2005)?
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 old and small city north-east of Turkey. Kerim, a 42-year-old unmarried man, has been for 12 years in Frankfurt, Germany. There, it’s been four years he doesn’t write poems. He took refuge in the library where he can find books enough for “twenty lifetimes”.He especially likes Turgenev: the Russian writer. He doesn’t bother much learning German: “my body resisted German language”. But he meets with fellow Turks. Ka has only two fears in his life: fear of not being natural and fear of writing bad poems. He considers himself to be a political exile in Germany; a “correct and sad” man like the heroes of Chekhov; someone who likes solitude.Ka was condemned for an article he didn't write. Until the 1970’s, people could write everything in Turkey: nobody went to jail; but, after the military coup, things got different;… so, he fled to Germany. Meanwhile his mother died, and he had to return to Istanbul. After that, he decides to go to Kars: while traveling by bus to the remote city he lies to someone who inquires him; Ka says he’s going to Kars because he’s a journalist and will report on local elections and the suicide-of-women problem. But he’s going to Kars hoping to find beautiful İpek, and to ask her to marry him.İpek attended college with Kars. But then got married. Ka will stay for three days in Kars where 40 % of the population is Kurdish. While strolling around the city Ka notices cafes are filled with unemployed Kurds. It’s a deserted-looking city; yet full of History: the Russian period (1877-1918)…and the period when some Armenians were rich. You can still contemplate millenarian Armenian churches there. (above, the cathedral where once the "talented" Armenian child George Ivanovich Gurdjieff sung)There are billboards in Kars saying: ”The Human Being is a masterpiece of God, suicide is an insult”. They try to halt the suicide rate.In Kars, while talking to the local newspaper editor, Ka sees the snow keeps falling: an incredible amount outside.Purging snow? ...There’s a cry for solitude …everywhere.Why are women committing suicide in Kars? A suicide rate that is four times above world-average. Some say it all started in Batman village (a bastion of the Turkish Hezbollah): women are suicidal too. Explanations include premeditation….and women being manipulated.In Kars he meets İpek Hanim; she’s been divorced. She’s the daughter of the hotel manager, where Ka is lodged at. They speak about mothers who died;…while they talk at a café a murder takes place just before them. It’s a religious motivated homicide.One of the murderer’s motives is rooted on the precept/question: should women cover head and face? *İpek’s father (Turgut Bei) is a communist. One of the candidates in the local elections is Muhtar Bei; he 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. ...People liked the Refah Party; it was the most voted in 1995; but in 1998 it was dissolved by decree by the generals’ pressure.This is truly a political novel,…and Ka who never got interested in politics,… (Ka so far buried in silence) is about to be dragged into it. Issues of Ka’s time are Turkish issues today (still): freedom of the press, religion and the rule of Law. ----*13th February 2013,luckily,I guess,I bumped recently into this "old" (Wednesday February 16,2000) issue of the Financial Times; an article [Iran's Islamic feminists passionate about equality and the Koran] by Roula Khalaf,reporting on the "female factor" in elections in Iran.I quote:"Fariba Dadayoudi-Mohajer says she prefers not to be called a feminist.Indeed her appearance and desmeanour suggest tradition and conservatism.Covered in a black chador -the all-enveloping robe-she pushes her headscarf closer to her face when a man enters the room. She insists she would wear the chador even if it were not imposed by Iran's Islamic state". "Feminism" meanings,may differ...---[Afghanistan]...own cultural evolution and it was a period of progressive social development under King Mohammad Zahir Shah. They built secular schools, a university, roads, and created an infrastructure. Most importantly, that family’s policy slowly brought a liberalisation of gender relations and the unveiling of women. By 1975 women had moved into public life pretty dramatically. There were women radio presenters, teachers, doctors, lawyers. There were almost as many women graduating from university as men—and they wore Western clothing and not a body bag." TAMIM ANSARY, interviewed by The Economist,Feb 14th 2013.
—Owlseyes
To have two abandoned books in one evening is not good. In fact this has never happened to me before.However, I just didn't like this book at all and skimmed through it. The idea of this individual called Ka, a celebrated poet, who goes to Kars reporting on the elections and also checking on girls who commit suicides, I found somewhat bizarre. When I arrived at Chapter 8, "Girls Who Commit Suicide are not Even Muslims", well that just about finished it for me.In my opinion, there were words leaping all over the place without any meaning or substance. I arrived at the end and thought do I need to torment myself? No. So into the "cloud" it sailed.I see that Mr Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 and that he's "one of the freshest, most original voices in contemporary fiction". Well, we all have reading choice in life and that's my reasoning.
—Lynne King
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 because I had heard such great things about this author, and Pamuk didn’t seem like a bogus poser from what I’d read. The story is about an expatriate Turkish poet named Ka who leads a solitary and arid life in Frankfurt and travels to a remote village in his homeland, ostensibly to investigate a spate of suicides by religious Muslim women protesting the injunction to remove their head scarves at school. He is really there to kindle a romance with a recently divorced woman he knew at university. The novel unfolds over three days when the snow has cut off the town from the outside world. What transpires is a coup led by a dysfunctional theater troupe, a lot of political intrigue, and much ball batting between secular and religious townspeople. Pamuk gives equal billing to every opinion, although they do not differ much in terms of their reductive, inflamed and binary natures, or in ability to capture my interest or sustained attention. This is in large part because the protagonist Ka is stunted,childish and infuriating himself, and the writing is both busy and detached. The political intrigue and opinions in Snow are not interesting or illuminating, as they do not emanate from fleshed-out people, but cardboard cut-outs spouting giant, densely packed and tedious word bubbles.Inspiration strikes Ka while in Kars, and he stops to transcribe a series of nineteen poems, whenever they descend on him in perfectly realized form. Conveniently they get lost, but a conversation about them between Ka and his paramour goes like this: “Is it beautiful?” he asked her a few moments later.“Yes, it’s beautiful!” said Ipek.Ka read a few more lines aloud and then asked her again, “Is it beautiful?”“It’s beautiful,” Ipek replied.When he finished reading the poem, he asked, “So what was it that made it beautiful?”“I don’t know,” Ipek replied, “but I did find it beautiful.”“Did Muhtar [her ex] ever read you a poem like this?”“Never,” she said.Ka began to read the poem aloud again, this time with growing force, but he still stopped at all the same places to ask, “Is it beautiful?” He also stopped at a few new places to say, “It really is very beautiful, isn’t it?”“Yes, it’s very beautiful!” Ipek replied.To my mind, only a child under ten should ever be indulged in this sort of megalomania, and then only by his mother, but Ka is nowhere punished, ridiculed or even chided for his insufferable personality, and in fact I think we are supposed to admire him as embodying the innocence, purity, pathos and single-mindedness that come with being a true artist. Margaret Atwood says, in the New York Times Book Review “Not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times. [Pamuk is] narrating his country into being.” This seems to me the best case for why Snow won the Nobel Prize. The book makes Turkey legible, as well as digestible, to the West. The novel is chock a block with allusions to white western male institutions – Kafka, Coleridge, Mann, Nabokov (he wrote a lot of stuff in the west, anyway): an annoying and intrusive narrator, a novelist named Orhan, whose games of peek-a-boo get harder and harder to humor, an abysmal, abyssal usage of literary envelopes, a morose and misunderstood genius of a hero who falls desparately in love with a woman he obstinately refuses to lend more than one dimension – the sex scenes, incidentally, are some of the most unintentionally off-putting I have ever read, and recall the experience almost every woman has been unfortunate to undergo at least once, where she feels she might leave the room, go get some cheesecake and stand in the door frame watching her partner rythmically brutalizing a stack of pillows in laughable ignorance of her whereabouts or even existence. Afterwards our hero has the witlessness to add to the injury by calling this essentially masturbatory act “love-making”. In fact, this pretty much sums up my response to the whole book.
—Hallie
