Isolated from the World

Snow 

by Orhan Pamuk

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”  ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the small Turkish town of Kars, isolated from the rest of the world for three days by a snowstorm. The plot of the novel is as intricate and symmetrical as the pattern of a snowflake. As narrated by Pamuk himself, he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves, but also seeking Ýpek, a woman on whom he had a crush many years before. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found.

This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore.

Though slow reading at times, Snow has considerable appeal as a satire of a paralyzed society in which political and social groups are either too weak or too fanatical. Locked in perpetual conflict, none of them can establish a nuanced stance or interact, except violently. Consequently, over the course of the novel, the dilemma of each character becomes bleaker, each caught between the violence of Islamic radicalism and government crackdowns. Some Western readers, often seeing themselves as the victims, may gain a more nuanced grasp of the conflict and the almost impossible situation in which the people of the Middle East find themselves. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.

Snow from Greenland to the Future

Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Høeg

“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.”  ― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

Danish novelist Heg's first English-language publication moves from an intimate mystery to an ever-widening circle of corruption and danger--and to even colder climes. Surly Inuit/Greenlander Smilla Jaspersen is a world-class expert on ice and snow who, since emigrating to Denmark, has gone on nine scientific expeditions to her homeland and published half a dozen highly regarded papers in scholarly journals--but she still can't hold a steady job. Isaiah Christensen, her six-year-old downstairs neighbor with a long-standing fear of heights, plunges from the roof of the White Palace, his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. With the help of another neighbor, dyslexic mechanic Peter Fjl, Smilla follows a trail from the White Palace through the Cryolite records of a fateful (and fatal) 1966 expedition, and ends up aboard the Kronos, a smuggling ship stuffed with drugs and desperate characters and bound for Greenland's Barren Glacier and a truly unimaginable cargo.


Snow
by Orhan Pamuk

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”  ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the winter of 1992 in the city of Kars in the north-eastern part of Turkey. The story is narrated by Pamuk himself as he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves, but also in the hope of meeting a woman he used to know. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found. This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.


Snow Country
by Yasunari Kawabata

“The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.”  ― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer’s masterpiece: a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. The novel began as a single short story published in a literary journal in January 1935. Kawabata continued writing about the characters afterward, with parts of the novel ultimately appearing in five different journals before he published the the book in whole. He continued working on the novel over a period of years. Finally, in 1948, the novel reached its final form as "Snow country", a literal translation of the Japanese title "Yukiguni". The name comes from the place where the story takes place, where Shimamura arrives in a train coming through a long tunnel under the border mountains between Gunma and Niigata Prefectures. Sitting at the foot of mountains, on the north side, this region receives a huge amount of snow in winter because of the northern winds coming across the Sea of Japan. The winds accumulate moisture over the sea and deposit it as snow while running up against the mountains. The snow reaches four to five meters in depths, sometimes isolating the towns and villages in the region from others. The lonely atmosphere suggested by the title is infused throughout the book.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, Kawabata's stark tale of a love affair between a Tokyo dilettante and a provincial geisha takes place in the town of Yuzawa. The hot springs in that region were home to inns, visited by men traveling alone and in groups, where paid female companionship had become a staple of the economy. The geisha of the hot springs enjoyed nothing like the social status of their more artistically trained sisters in Kyoto and Tokyo and were usually little more than prostitutes whose brief careers inevitably ended in a downward spiral. The liaison between the geisha, Komako, and the male protagonist, a wealthy loner who is a self-appointed expert on Western ballet, is thus doomed from the opening. The nature of that failure and the parts played by others form the theme of the book. I thrilled at the dense simplicity and sadness of Kawabata's story.


Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson

“When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.”  ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

In the future the only relief from the sea of logos is the computer-generated universe of virtual reality? But now a strange computer virus, called Snow Crash, is striking down hackers, leaving an unlikely young man as humankind's last hope. Like many of Stephenson's other novels it covers history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, mimetics, and philosophy.
Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning... was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. Stephenson wrote about the Macintosh that "When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash' ". Snow Crash established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923.

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The Illusion of Love

The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk

"Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves a dark house and a whip as madmen do:  and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love to." - Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, II, iii, 7

“Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.” ― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain



Writing about Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada, Orhan Pamuk said that "Nabokov reminds us that our memories allow us to carry our childhood with us, and with it the golden age we thought we had left behind." This is not that dissimilar from the memories of the narrator of Orhan Pamuk's scintillating novel The Museum of Innocence. It is with a memory of love, obsessive and passionate, inflamed by Eros that Kemal, the narrator of the story, begins his tale.
It is a tale that reminded me of Socrates discussion of the myth of the chariot in The Phaedrus. The charioteer is filled with warmth and desire as he gazes into the eyes of the one he loves. Ultimately he is torn by a sort of divine madness. In the novel Kemal tells how "I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge men into a deep dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure." (pp 52-3)
Fairly soon into the story Kemal throws over the perfection of his fiance, Sibel, whose "perfect placement of every pearl" cannot compete with the hold that Eros has over him in his overwhelming passion of the young girl Fusun.
Now if this is all there was to this story the novel would be short, semi-sweet, and in spite of the beautiful prose of the author not worthy of much further comment. But, as you may suspect there is more to this novel than this simple, albeit passionate, tale of a Turkish love triangle. No, the Museum of Innocence plumbs the depths of illusion. There is the illusion of love, the illusion of time, and ultimately the illusion of life.

The malleability of time is evidence of what the narrator calls "the illusion that is time." (p 282) It is compared to the difference between the personal life we each live within and the "official" time that we share with others. Kemal's obsessive love controlled his personal time even as the clock on the wall in Fusun's home ticked off the "time". The reader experiences a similar sensation when the regularity of short chapters of the novel is suddenly broken by chapter 24, "The Engagement Party", which is almost five times longer than the average length of those preceding. You must discover for yourself what intimacies of plot detail warrant a slowing of the flow of the story.
Kemal's obsessive love is also illusory and leads him through memories of a life that is just as much illusion as he is blinded to the reality of the individuals who people his world.  These individuals include the man that his ideal love marries and the people involved in the Turkish cinema world that surround both him and Fusun.

Ultimately the narrative succeeds in communicating the complexity of what Kemal calls "the strange and mysterious spirit" of his days spent pursuing the illusion of life through obsessive love. The suspense keeps building as the novel progresses to the point where you begin to feel like those actors on the stage who wait for the next direction.  Acting as the spine of the story is the development of the Museum of Innocence - a museum that transcends the space of the novel, which also becomes a collection of episodes in the life of a collector - someone whose passions make for exceptional reading.

Illustrations: 1) The museum, named after the novel, which houses a collection of Istanbul's past cultural and daily life artifacts from the time period the novel was set in. 2) The author.

The Museum of Innocence: A Novel by Orhan Pamuk. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009 (2008)

Miniaturists and the Mystery of Books

My Name Is Red 

by Orhan Pamuk

"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. " 
— Orhan Pamuk (My Name Is Red)


My reading enjoyment was increased when I discovered Orhan Pamuk through this novel that is filled with jeweled prose and alluring digressions, nesting stories within stories. But if that was all there was to this book my enjoyment would be severely limited. Instead there is more including a story of an oriental mystery: In Istanbul, in the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. But when one of the miniaturists goes missing and is feared murdered, their master seeks outside help. Each chapter of the novel has a different narrator, and usually there are thematic and chronological connections between chapters. In addition, unexpected voices are used, such as the corpse of the murdered, a coin, Satan, two dervishes, and the color red. Each of these "unusual" narrators is contributed by specific characters, which detail the philosophical system of 16th century Istanbul. The novel blends mystery, romance, and philosophical puzzles, illustrating the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III during nine snowy winter days in 1591. There is also embedded within the miniaturists and their stories and digressions the wonder of literature itself, of the nature of books and of their impact on life, culture and history. This makes for a great book that I would recommend to all.


"A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!" 
— Orhan Pamuk (My Name Is Red)


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Istanbul: Memories and the City 

by Orhan Pamuk

The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.

- Ahmet Rasim

Orhan Pamuk begins his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, with a meditation on his doppelganger, the other Orhan in his life when he was a young boy. This is both an indication of the budding artist within and a metaphor for the city without, the city in which he was to grow up and live. Capturing a sense of the Istanbul of memory and tradition and juxtaposing it with the Istanbul as seen by outsiders, especially the literary lights that visited Istanbul over the years, Pamuk creates a rich texture for his story of the memories and city. Augmented by literally hundreds of photographs of city, family and history this is a unique look at one of the great centers of civilization.


The memoir is colored by melancholy, a word rooted in the Greek melankholia referring to pensive reflection marked by a dark or sad outlook. The Turkish word for melancholy is huzun and it has an Arabic root with a much more nuanced meaning that spans thoughts of both material pleasure and spirtual loss. According to Pamuk:


"The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." (p 91)


It is this feeling that Pamuk tries to capture in his discussions and digressions on his own experience of Istanbul and that of the others, often from the West, who have observed its life. So we encounter comments and thoughts from writers as diverse as Levi-Strauss, Ruskin, Flaubert, Gide and Gerard de Nerval. But there are also the insights of local writers like the novelist Tanpinar who, influenced by the French poet Theophile Gautier, wrote in a poetic and painterly mode of the vistas of Istanbul and extolled "the painterly style of writers like Stendahl, Balzac, and Zola" (p 227).


While Pamuk discusses the view of Istanbul "Under Western Eyes" (pp 234-44) he also finds the source of this melancholy in the ruins of the old city as seen both in his personal experience and through his reading of Tanpinar and others. He also meditates on the impact and meaning of the Bosporus to himself and his family. The city becomes a dream to which its denizens could aspire. "We might call this dream -- which grew out of the barren, isolated, destitute neighborhoods beyon the city walls -- the 'melancholy of the ruins'" (p 253)


The sum of all these thoughts and more is a brilliant and evocative image of the Istanbul that encourages the reader to read more and the traveller to visit and see for himself. This reader found in the memoir everything that he had come to expect from Pamuk's fiction melded with a passion for family, literature and city. It has become another favorite of mine from the pen of this great writer.




Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Vintage Books, New York. 2006 (2003)
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Snow

Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.

- Stendahl, The Charterhouse of Parma

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the winter of 1992 in the city of Kars in the north-eastern part of Turkey.
The story is narrated by Pamuk himself as he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka, who has traveled to this remote town to write about the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves. This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.

Snow: a novel by Orhan Pamuk. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 2005 (2002)