Snow

I've got this new “life project” thing that I've started up, whereby I am going to try to read at least one piece of literature from every nation on the planet. Orhan Pamuk's Snow was the first book that I read as part of that.

The point of saying this is to point out that this is not the type of book that I would normally read. While I do occasionally read novels that would be categorized as “capital L” literature, they are usually ones of an older vintage; classics, if you will. It was in that personal headspace that I sat down to read Snow.

Plot-wise, Snow centers around a poet named Ka, returning to Turkey from political exile in Germany, ostensibly in order to investigate a series of suicides among “head scarf girls” in the village of Kars.

Simply put, the book was a masterpiece of desolation and isolation. Throughout the novel Ka must come to grips with not only the head-scarf girls, but through them, his own feelings about his homeland, his religion, and his own emotional landscape. Pamuk's Turkey is a country caught in the crossroads - caught between Europe and Asia, between “secular humanism” and radical Islam, and between love and apathy. It's a fairly difficult read, but overall, it's well worth the experience of reading it.