Snow

From Strand Bookstore

The poet Ka returns to Turkey after a long exile and travels to the snowbound city of Kars. He intends to write about a wave of suicides among Islamist schoolgirls, but his deeper interest is in a long lost love: the radiant, recently divorced Ipek. As he pursues her, Ka is drawn into debates that touch on both his future and his country's - and that, in critical moments, spill over into terrifying bloodshed. 'Conscience-ridden and carefully wrought.' 448p.

From the Publisher

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red (“a sumptuous thriller”–John Updike; “chockful of sublimity and sin”–New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother’s funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer’s curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka’s motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka’s youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka’s frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.

Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties


From the Hardcover edition.

Review

Christopher Tayler - London Review of Books
"[Orham Pamuk's] books cheerfully plunder a bewildering range of material: stories, ideas and images from Rumi, Attar and the ARABIAN NIGHTS rub shoulders with borrowings from Dostoevsky, Rilke, Proust and Joyce. Like Borges, whom he also admires, he cultivates spooky parallels between Islamic mysticism and European Modernism. In a less rarefied vein, he writes well about loneliness, nostalgia, cities and weather, and his novels have interesting things to say about politics and culture in Turkey. They even offer the traditional satisfactions of character and plot...."

Review

Margaret Atwood - New York Times Book Review
"This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orham Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times....He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of 'Westernization' and those of the Islamists. Although it's set in the 1990s and was begun before Sept. 11, SNOW is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts. Like Pamuk's other novels, SNOW is an in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul."

Review

John Leonard - Harper's
"From the Golden Horn, with a wicked grin, the political novel makes a triumphant return."

Review

Kirkus
"An astonishingly complex, disturbing view of a world we owe it to our selves to better understand."

More about the book

A burned-out Turkish writer has spent many years in Germany as a political exile, resigned to a life of dreary bleakness. Then his mother dies, and he returns home to Istanbul, where a series of inexplicable events in a nearby town provoke his curiosity. Why are young Islamic girls committing suicide? And what is the real story behind the military coup and its crackdown on extremists? As he gets drawn further into the situation, he finds himself writing with his old fervor, and he falls in love with a woman he knew long ago. Now all he wants to do is change his life, but to do so he must somehow throw off the effects of anguish and alienation.... Named by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2004.