Snow, Orhan Pamuk (read September 2008)

I finished reading this novel near Christmas 2008. It had a profound, sad effect on me. The atmosphere of poverty, political and social disillusionment, and melancholy permeates the text at every level. Even the sequences of joy in which Ka (protagonist) is having a poetic inspiration or making love to Ipek have a tone of sadness - as if the joyful moment is real, but fleeting, unable to gain a mooring in the otherwise impoverished world of Kars. I almost couldn't finish reading the book. Not for the joylessness but, rather, for the sluggish plot through the middle - this is a personal thing for me and probably doesn't reflect poorly on the text overall. The final 100 pages, however, pick up and bring the story to an unsurprising conclusion - in fact, the tenor of the novel is like a constant, distant drum beating the demise of the characters and their relationships. In reflection, the three day story is a miniature of the social-political and philosophical tug of war that exists in the westernized Turkish Islamic world, with Kars existing as a focal point for the dialogue between the unseen, oft cited western democracies, fundamental Islam and the nationalist Turkish movement. For me, not familiar with this world and having never visited Turkey, it was a valuable learning experience.