by Orhan Pamuk

Last Friday, the day our book club was scheduled to meet, I noticed this article in the New York Times. Normally, a headline about an Armenian editor being assassinated in Turkey would never have caught my eye for more than a few seconds. But, it fit so closely to the issues dealt with in Snow, which I had just finished reading, I decided to pay attention. I won’t go into the details of the assassination, as it has received quite a bit of media attention that you can read for yourself here, here and here. But I will say that it set this novel forthrightly in reality for me.

Epic in scope, [Snow] encapsulates many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey into a few snowy days in a small Turkish town and successfully combines humor, social commentary, mysticism, and a deep sympathy with its characters.

In October 2006, Pamuk became the first Turk ever to win the Nobel Prize, describing him as such:

…who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.

As someone without much knowledge of Turkey or its culture, I was glad to read something from the Turkish perspective — something to counterbalance the animosity I’ve witnessed towards Turkish exiles and immigrants in Western Europe (i.e. opposition to Turkey becoming a member of the European Union, blaming of immigrants for a country’s social ills, etc.). The book readily depicts the complexities of religion, faith, and fundamentalism within a secular state struggling to find its place in Europe (or figuring out whether it even wants to be “European”). While intense, I think this book is too important in today’s political climate not to read.