Book Corner February 21, 2005

SNOW by Orhan Pamuk
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
New York:  Alfred Knopf, 2004; pp. 425

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

              In the February  20 , 2005 New York Times Book Review, Pamuk's book, Snow, is listed among the top ten books of 2004.  If you have never read this author, do so!  He is a writer who is splendidly chameleon-like in presenting himself as political, realistic, surrealistic, mystical, poetic and historical. Above all else, he is simply an excellent storyteller.

            The novel's main figure is a Europeanized Turk named "Ka," a poet and journalist.

Returning to Turkey after many years in Europe, he is drawn back for many reasons: a family funeral, seeing old friends and a woman from his earlier days named Ipek.  The journey is also prompted by his writer's instincts to find out why a number of young Muslim girls are committing suicide when forbidden to wear the traditional Islamic headwear at school.

            This novel captures many of the primary themes of other Pamuk's works.  He deals with the tensions he finds in a Turkey which is both European and secular and yet deeply Islamic in some ways.  His ability to explore the fine and puzzling nuances of male and female relationships is also manifest.  Dialogue among the various characters and Ka's interior monologues produce some excellent theological reflections.

In all his works, Pamuk creates remarkable atmospherics. The opening chapter on the bus trip through a blizzard will awaken any reader's apprehensions and memories of such treacherous trips. The protagonist views the isolated city he visits as it is locked in the blizzard:  

"As he listened to them, shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow, and gazed at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of the streetlights, the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him" (p 19)

             Pamuk's ability to weave the personal and the political, the life giving and the destructive and the amusing with the tragic, offers the reader a great deal on which to reflect and opens up, with new beauty, the old questions.