A review by lizawall
Snow by Orhan Pamuk

2.0

I read this book on a plane leaving people I loved in a city I had once thought would be my own. I was basically ready to be moved by anything, and this book still didn't do it. The last flight I was on the person next to me was also reading it, so it seems to be a plane book. Snow, snow, snow, snow. Yes, it can symbolize a lot of things. But where are you going with it, after all? And usually I like to think I can tell, but in this case I wasn't sure whether the failing was mine or the book's. Or translator's? Anyway, I found all this snow talk pretty tedious and twee. And then, well, where to even start. So there is this novel, where we are being told that the central character is writing these absolutely sublime poems, but we don't get the poems themselves, except for lines here and there that don't sound very good at all. Are we supposed to believe it? I didn't. And there are lots of things that I find interesting, like framing and fragments, that this book seems to play with, but the play is not quite playful enough and nor does it seem (to me) profound. And there was a lot of doubling, tripling, a lot of things you could bring up in a book club discussion or something, but why? Ka as a main character seems, with a few exceptions, neither like a plausible person or a meaningful conceit. There were some moments when Snow seemed to point somewhere more intriguing, but so much of it read to me like a performance that was phoned in, like markers that said I meant to put something better here, but didn't. (Still, I feel like I could go on and on about it, which is weird for a book I didn't like very much.) Basically, I don't recommend it unless you can't find anything else in the airport bookstore.