Pamuk's Snow
The last novel I read was by Kiran Desai. The next one I started was Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I'd taught his My Name Is Red, toward the end of last term, and that motivated me to pull another one of his off my unread shelf and get to it. In looking something up online, I discovered that Desai and Pamuk are, or at least recently were, a couple.
Good grief, the authors I like are now dating each other. This may put too much pressure on my future reading choices.
Anyway, the novel is mostly set in the eastern Turkish city of Kars, during a winter snowstorm, on just one three-day weekend. The Turkish word for snow is "kar" so there's an intentional echo here. The snowstorm is so bad the city is cut off from the outside world for the weekend. (I didn't get to visit Kars when I was in the area, because, having been there in the winter, Kars was cut off by a snowstorm and a recent earthquake. I immediately related to the story's premise.)
Adding to the wordplay, the poet who is the main character is named Ka; and he seems to evoke Kafka's character K from The Castle, and perhaps the K of The Trial. (Which reminds me that I need to read the new translation...) K, Ka, Kar, Kars.
Pamuk writes in a couple of styles, and this novel is framed as a novel by the author of The Black Book, which is the name of a Pamuk novel, which is in a similar Kafkaesque style. I liked The Black Book, and I liked Snow, but it's not my favorite Pamuk mode.
The poet Ka arrives in Kars on a quest -- only half admitted to himself -- to meet an old flame who has recently divorced. He discovers that the city is riven by struggles between the Islamists and the secularists, and the Socialists and the Kurdish seperatists. A number of schoolgirls have taken to illegally wearing the headscarf; and a number of girls and women have recently committed suicide. When the snow isolates the town, there is a mini-coup staged by military sympathizers, and things get very complicated. Because Ka is supposedly acting as a reporter for an Istanbul newspaper and some German journals, all sides seek him out. This includes a notorious rebel, named Blue.
Ugliness ensues. The reader, however, is kept at a distance by the Kafka-style narration, which keeps the reader looking in from the outside; and in which characters behave impulsively and inexplicably, and the reader is just told what the impulse is, without actually being engaged by it.
Serious as the subject matter is (people have died, more people will die), there are surreal, exaggerated, and comical elements as well, that make the book feel somewhat more a satire than a realistic story. If I had to label it in two words, they would be "Kafkaesque satire."
CBIP: Life of the Empress Josephine, anonymous (Cecil B. Hartley?)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Complete Illustrated History of the Aztec & Maya, Charles Phillips
China Marine, Eugene B. Sledge
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Good grief, the authors I like are now dating each other. This may put too much pressure on my future reading choices.
Anyway, the novel is mostly set in the eastern Turkish city of Kars, during a winter snowstorm, on just one three-day weekend. The Turkish word for snow is "kar" so there's an intentional echo here. The snowstorm is so bad the city is cut off from the outside world for the weekend. (I didn't get to visit Kars when I was in the area, because, having been there in the winter, Kars was cut off by a snowstorm and a recent earthquake. I immediately related to the story's premise.)
Adding to the wordplay, the poet who is the main character is named Ka; and he seems to evoke Kafka's character K from The Castle, and perhaps the K of The Trial. (Which reminds me that I need to read the new translation...) K, Ka, Kar, Kars.
Pamuk writes in a couple of styles, and this novel is framed as a novel by the author of The Black Book, which is the name of a Pamuk novel, which is in a similar Kafkaesque style. I liked The Black Book, and I liked Snow, but it's not my favorite Pamuk mode.
The poet Ka arrives in Kars on a quest -- only half admitted to himself -- to meet an old flame who has recently divorced. He discovers that the city is riven by struggles between the Islamists and the secularists, and the Socialists and the Kurdish seperatists. A number of schoolgirls have taken to illegally wearing the headscarf; and a number of girls and women have recently committed suicide. When the snow isolates the town, there is a mini-coup staged by military sympathizers, and things get very complicated. Because Ka is supposedly acting as a reporter for an Istanbul newspaper and some German journals, all sides seek him out. This includes a notorious rebel, named Blue.
Ugliness ensues. The reader, however, is kept at a distance by the Kafka-style narration, which keeps the reader looking in from the outside; and in which characters behave impulsively and inexplicably, and the reader is just told what the impulse is, without actually being engaged by it.
Serious as the subject matter is (people have died, more people will die), there are surreal, exaggerated, and comical elements as well, that make the book feel somewhat more a satire than a realistic story. If I had to label it in two words, they would be "Kafkaesque satire."
CBIP: Life of the Empress Josephine, anonymous (Cecil B. Hartley?)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Complete Illustrated History of the Aztec & Maya, Charles Phillips
China Marine, Eugene B. Sledge
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy