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Zusatztext “Astonishingly timely . . . A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy! romance! and noir.” — Vogue “Not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning! but essential reading for our times.” —Margaret Atwood! The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Orhan Pamuk; Introduction by Margaret Atwood; Translated by Maureen Freely Klappentext The Nobel Prize-winner's second novel to appear in an Everyman edition is a spellbinding story of a poet seeking his lost love in a remote Turkish town riven by religious conflict and cut off from the world by a blizzard. Returning to Turkey from exile in the West! Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicenter of the suicides! the eastern border city of Kars! is also home to the radiant and newly divorced Ýpek! a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends on Kars! violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to explode! and Ka finds his sympathies drawn in unexpected and dramatic directions. I N T R O D U C T I O N By Margaret Atwood Just as Turkey stands at the crossroads of the Muslim East/Middle East and the European and North American West, so Orhan Pamuk’s work inhabits the shifting ground of an increasingly dangerous cultural and religious overlap, where ideologies as well as personalities collide. It’s no exaggeration to say that you have to read Pamuk if you want to begin to understand what’s going on in people’s hearts, minds and souls in such a world. In Turkey, he is far more than a novelist: people rush to read his novels as if he’s a kind of sure-fire prophet, or a hugely popular singer, or a national psychoanalyst or a one-man newspaper editorial page. There is nothing programmatic about his novels; he simply writes out of the center of the whirlwind both his characters and his Turkish readers feel swept up in every day. Where is Turkey going? How will it come to terms with its once glorious, often troubled history, and resolve the conflict between old and new, and handle the power struggle between secularists and Islamists, and find self-respect, or peace of mind, or inner wholeness or a new direction? Pamuk’s novels don’t provide cut-and-dried solutions, but they follow the tortuous lines of such questionings with anguished and wrenching fidelity. Sometimes his characters are almost literally torn apart by choices they don’t know how to make, but are forced to make. His power as a novelist stems in part from his refusal to judge the choices his characters make: their tragedy is that no matter what path they take, they can’t be at ease; and, worse, some other element in their society is bound to condemn them. Although it’s set in the 1990s and was begun before 9/11, Snow is eerily prescient, both in its analyses of fundamentalist attitudes and in the nature of the repression and rage and conspiracies and violence it depicts. Like Pamuk’s other novels, Snow is an in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul. It’s the story of Ka, a gloomy but appealing poet who hasn’t written anything in years. But Ka is not his own narrator: by the time of the telling he has been assassinated, and his tale is pieced together by an ‘‘old friend’’ of his who just happens to be named Orhan. As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has returned to Istanbul after twelve years for his mother’s funeral. He’s making his way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm begins. (Kar is ‘‘snow’’ in Turkish, so we have already been given an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist interested in the recent ...
About the author
Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The author of The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, and My Name Is Red, he lives in Istanbul and New York City.
