Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Read the full post at - Snow by Orhan Pamuk If you’re coming to Snow because you loved A Strangeness in My Mind – and that’s exactly why I picked it up – adjust your expectations. Same author, but it’s a very different book. I’d tell you that Snow is better read alongside The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid than alongside anything else in Pamuk’s own catalog. Which is not a complaint. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But it’s a different book. The novel is set in Kars, a remote, snowed-in town in eastern Turkey. A poet called Ka returns from political exile, ostensibly to investigate a wave of suicides among young girls from conservative Muslim families. The investigation is the reason he’s there. It is not really what the book is about. What the book is about is culture and religion and who gets to belong. Who fits in? What actually counts as a free choice? Where does the freedom of the individual end and the freedom of the group begin? Most of that gets worked out through the…

Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town