Snow

I (sort of) finished Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Click here to read his Nobel Prize (2006) acceptance lecture. This was my first encounter with Pamuk's writing. I became intrigued after a student of mine read The New Life (The New Life / translated by       Güneli Gün. – New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997 ; London : Faber & Faber, 1997. – Translation of Yeni Hayat) and found it baffling, plotless, and too dense for her taste. She is 18 but when I read the first few pages of her copy, I found his writing elegant and very focused on the psychological interior.

I'm still not sure what I think about Snow. One judgment I have is that the female characters did not seem authentic to me; they were too physically beautiful. I often ponder this phenomenon when reading books by male authors--I accept their obsession with their sexual identity and their fascination with beautiful women. But it's a little bit hard for me to relate; which is fine, because I am being invited into their consciousness, which is expanding. I remember the turning point on this issue; I had read my fourth or so book by V.S. Naipaul and realized I was tired of this being such a central theme in his novels, or at least that novel. I think I was simultaneously reading a lot of Isaac Bashevis Singer and wearying of his love triangles where two women were obsessed with his male protagonist (Woody Allen films, anyone?). I think Shadows on the Hudson was the final straw.

I'm digressing from Snow. Either way, it is a beautiful, melancholy book about a tortured, anxious poet, an exile from the Turkish bourgeoisie. The book introduced me to Turkish concerns through the eyes of Pamuk. It concerns itself with the cost of ideologies in a country struggling with its identity, and its low status in the eyes of Europe, and also perhaps the cost of personal romanticism (love?). It requires a bit of stamina, at 450+ pages, but I found it very rewarding on several levels.