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bookish_wendy's review against another edition
2.0
I wanted to like it. I wanted to get in to it. But it just never captured me. An author too ambitious? A reader too dense? We'll never know.
jdintr's review against another edition
5.0
One of my favorite reads of the year, Pamuk pulls back the curtain of the Turkish culture wars (Islamism vs. Secularism; Modernism vs. Tradition) and weave a haunting, fascinating story of a secular atheist poet who finds love and God, heartbreak and hopelessness over three snow-laden days in Kars.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
An Aorist Country
Religion is rarely about dogma or belief and almost always about membership in a group and the feeling of belonging it creates. Snow is an absurdist novel about religion as community and its communal conflicts.
The protagonist, Ka, is a sort of thirty-something adolescent who finds himself in a blizzard, in love, in a state ruled by paranoia, and in the midst of a local revolution begun by a provincial theatre-group (remarkably like a Turkish version of Heinrich Boll's Clown). This constitutes his isolated but very god-like, omniscient community: "In Kars everyone always knows about everything that’s going on."
But Kars, situated as it is in Eastern Turkey, is hardly a single community. Its history is Russian, and Iranian, and Ottoman, and even a bit of English. Its inhabitants are Kurds, and Armenians, and Georgians and Azeris as well as Turks. And even among the ethnic Turks there are as many communities as there are distinctive interpretations of Islam.
Each of these communities, according to their members, is created by God. Various physical aspects of the Karsian world evoke God for the various communities. For example, “Snow reminds Ka of God!” Particularly 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, confused provincial Turkish folk. But that isn't how the locals see things.
The locals have a variety of religious communities from which to choose, ranging from radical Islam to secularist atheism. This 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. The state, since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, has attempted to replace rather than include local communities within itself. But it is merely a source of what we have come to know in the age of Trump as 'fake news.' Moreover, also as in the Trumpian vein, the state is an aspiring religion, with the sovereign power that all other religions would like to have. It uses this power and legal violence to present a binary choice to the population: ‘My Fatherland or My Headscarf.’
The intractable conflict created by this situation isn't new in Turkey (nor for that matter in America). It existed even in the Empire. In part 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 character of Turkish life through an ingenious literary technique that probably can't be rendered exactly in English.
Like Classical Greek, Turkish has a verb form, the Aorist or Habitual, which, although expressed in English, isn't explicit. The Aorist aspect is one of timeless repetition. It connotes past and future as well as present. The sense of the Aorist can be shown most simply in the crude English expression 'shit happens.' It doesn't just happen now; it has always happened and it always will. Turkey is the ancient, empoverished, embattled city of Kars, writ large, with its "endless wars, rebellions, massacres and atrocities." Shit just keeps happening.
The American version hasn't been written yet but it's long overdue.
Religion is rarely about dogma or belief and almost always about membership in a group and the feeling of belonging it creates. Snow is an absurdist novel about religion as community and its communal conflicts.
The protagonist, Ka, is a sort of thirty-something adolescent who finds himself in a blizzard, in love, in a state ruled by paranoia, and in the midst of a local revolution begun by a provincial theatre-group (remarkably like a Turkish version of Heinrich Boll's Clown). This constitutes his isolated but very god-like, omniscient community: "In Kars everyone always knows about everything that’s going on."
But Kars, situated as it is in Eastern Turkey, is hardly a single community. Its history is Russian, and Iranian, and Ottoman, and even a bit of English. Its inhabitants are Kurds, and Armenians, and Georgians and Azeris as well as Turks. And even among the ethnic Turks there are as many communities as there are distinctive interpretations of Islam.
Each of these communities, according to their members, is created by God. Various physical aspects of the Karsian world evoke God for the various communities. For example, “Snow reminds Ka of God!” Particularly 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, confused provincial Turkish folk. But that isn't how the locals see things.
The locals have a variety of religious communities from which to choose, ranging from radical Islam to secularist atheism. This 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. The state, since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, has attempted to replace rather than include local communities within itself. But it is merely a source of what we have come to know in the age of Trump as 'fake news.' Moreover, also as in the Trumpian vein, the state is an aspiring religion, with the sovereign power that all other religions would like to have. It uses this power and legal violence to present a binary choice to the population: ‘My Fatherland or My Headscarf.’
The intractable conflict created by this situation isn't new in Turkey (nor for that matter in America). It existed even in the Empire. In part 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 character of Turkish life through an ingenious literary technique that probably can't be rendered exactly in English.
Like Classical Greek, Turkish has a verb form, the Aorist or Habitual, which, although expressed in English, isn't explicit. The Aorist aspect is one of timeless repetition. It connotes past and future as well as present. The sense of the Aorist can be shown most simply in the crude English expression 'shit happens.' It doesn't just happen now; it has always happened and it always will. Turkey is the ancient, empoverished, embattled city of Kars, writ large, with its "endless wars, rebellions, massacres and atrocities." Shit just keeps happening.
The American version hasn't been written yet but it's long overdue.
runeclausen's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting novel, with a ever relevant theme, and a good premise of the rise of islamist powers in the far eastern city of Kars in the backwaters of Turkey. The book is full of drama and intrigue, as the main character, the istanbulite journalist Ka arrives in town to unravel a recent spate of suicides amongst young hijabi girls, but stumbles into much more encompassing issues out here in the remote provinces. The story has a strong beginning, but suffers from a dull long middle section, that failed to keep me too hooked. It does pick up again towards the end, but the very end does slow down again.
steveurick's review against another edition
1.0
Maybe it was the translation, but the conversations and actions of the characters did not make sense.
kmatthe2's review against another edition
5.0
A mesmerizingly beautiful book. Pamuk fleshes out the complexity that is Turkey's Arab/Islamic culture in a way that trumps both _Kite Runner_ and _Reading Lolita in Tehran_. Here we have Islamic radicals, moderates, atheists, cultural Arabs, and many more groups. More importantly, Pamuk gives us another look into women in Islamic culture -- those wrangling with the choice to wear the headscarf or not. The range of perspectives helps humanize a culture that has lost its diverse human face in recent years. Pamuk's prose is some of the most enchanting I've read (less Nabakov) -- props to him and his translator. Terrific.
zarco_j's review against another edition
1.0
I don't throw the word hate around lightly, but I absolutely hated this book!
The author made himself a character in his own story, then tried to imply it was a biography even though it clearly says it's a novel.
The charactarization in this novel is terrible, the men are whinging, childlike and fall in love with every woman they see. The women are either drop dead gorgeous or fat, there is no realism at all.
Yes, I get this won the Nobel Prize for Literature but it wasn't for me at all.
Will I read again... NO
Will I recommend... NO
Will I read more by this author... NO
The author made himself a character in his own story, then tried to imply it was a biography even though it clearly says it's a novel.
The charactarization in this novel is terrible, the men are whinging, childlike and fall in love with every woman they see. The women are either drop dead gorgeous or fat, there is no realism at all.
Yes, I get this won the Nobel Prize for Literature but it wasn't for me at all.
Will I read again... NO
Will I recommend... NO
Will I read more by this author... NO