Orhan Pamuk is one of my favorite authors. I had never heard of Turkey’s most famous novelist until a few years ago, when I got My Name is Red as a surprise birthday gift.
When Snow came out, I actually heard Pamuk speak about it at the Kennedy school. Later, I reviewed it for the books section of a weekly newspaper.
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Snow
By Orhan Pamuk
426 pages.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004.
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely.
Snow is a political novel. Pamuk settled any doubts about the novel’s nature by unambiguously stating so on his North American book tour. Like most of Pamuk’s other works, it is also a tragic love story.
On the political front, Snow deals with a number of themes. How European a country is Turkey? What does the resurgence of political Islam imply for the Kemalist legacy? How does the Turkish state’s steadfast commitment to secularism, the army being its guardian, stand against the rise of the Islamist parties? Are the roots of Islamism purely ideological in nature or do endemic poverty and unemployment play a part? What is the role of the artist in the midst of such political turmoil? (more…)
