Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Orhan Pamuk
(translated by Maureen Freely)
Faber 2004
At first I found this novel fascinating. Pamuk’s description of political exile Ka, returned from Germany and taking the last bus to the remote snowbound Turkish city of Kars was engrossing, opening my eyes to a different world and boding well, I thought, for what was to come. To continue in a positive vein, Snow does explore an issue of crucial importance to the future of Europe: the role of Turkey and its sometimes violent struggle to remain a secular state in the face of a growing Islamic movement. Its criticism of leftists who make common cause with fundamentalists whose ideas are more repressive than the state’s, will always be timely. However, in the end for me it all came unstuck. The postmodern device of having a narrator called Orhan bookending Ka’s story and commenting on it didn’t help, and neither did the multiplicity of characters with similar names (also a postmodern device? I have no idea). A reviewer on Amazon would take me to task for this: she writes proudly that this novel won’t appeal to those old fashioned readers still hankering after convincing characterisation or plot. More than 400 pages of doing without both is a big ask though, I think – and especially when the writing is only rarely exceptional, often ordinary, and sometimes clunking (especially the dialogue). (This might just be a translation problem, of course.) Furthermore, if we must disregard story, character, and style, we are left just with the ideas - rather a miserable prescription for a novel. That’s not to say the ideas here aren’t interesting, of course – they are – but they are revisited again and again, and through a range of characters who are plainly only there as ciphers. I found the discussion of the role of art particularly hard to stomach: Ka is always stopping to jot down his apparently brilliant poems at the most inopportune moments but we never get to read any of them, and a theatre director takes his radical theatre much too far in a wholly unconvincing way. Alongside the ideas, and the novel’s undoubted “relevance”, the cover also promises a thriller, but there are few thrills, and the romantic interest, in the form of Ka’s infatuation with an old college acquaintance praised for her “enormous breasts”, doesn’t convince either. So, for me, a tiring and frustrating read – the latter because as Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, I really wanted to know what all the fuss was about. That he is a brave writer is without doubt, and in his native country I am sure that this novel has numerous resonances that I did not understand. I’m afraid though that Snow left me cold.
7 April 2010
http://www.orhanpamuk.net/
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