A review by ghostmouse
Snow by Orhan Pamuk

3.0

Snow was dense reading, like trudging through knee high snow, but it was so well written -not just sounding pretty, but developing well structurally- that I had to finish it, and in the end I was pleased with the ending which is an accomplishment. Because I kept falling asleep I don’t want to say I loved it, and it was a little colder than I like. Though I think for me its real flaw, and also one of its major fascinations, was how much it reminded me of Pale Fire. Both stories contain a poet and a prose writer, and are built by the prose writer around the central poem that gives the novel its title. In Pale Fire the poem is a third of the book; in Snow the poems are missing and their absence takes up space as the novel is structured around their writing. I want to go further into the parallels but they are too spoiler-y so I'm going to hold back, but I'm really curious if it was intentional by Pamuk. Because I kept thinking back to Pale Fire, it didn’t feel quite as new as it might have if I had never read Pale Fire, but it still was a really interesting good book.