Snow by Orhan Pamuk Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.85 You Save: $12.10 (76%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Snow
Book Review: Great book
Summary: 5 Stars
Fantastic novel for anyone interested in Muslim/Christian relations in the middle east. Sometimes the pace is a little clunky, but overall illuminating and very much worth reading.Book Review: He is Nobel Prize Vinner...
Summary: 5 Stars
What can I say? He got the Nobel!
I wish you could read this and other novels of Orhan Pamuk in his own language! You should also try other Turkish novelist... Including Yasar Kemal and his book Memed the Hawk...
Book Review: Hoped for so much more than "Snow" delivered.
Summary: 2 Stars
I managed to read all the way through this novel, but only because I was hoping to learn something about another culture. It was never coherently delivered. "Snow" does contain many opinions, but they are often self-contradictory. The final opinion is stated as: don't write what I think because no outsider will be able to understand us.
Ka, the central character, is confused and paranoid to start with and is gradually revealed to be self-centered, dependent, foolish, cowardly, and vengeful. Not the sort of person you'd want to spend time with, and certainly not a pleasing escort through the depressed town of Kars.
Characters are described in a wealth of detail, but most remain shallow. They come and go, more as a series of biographical sketches than as participants in each other's lives. The story is delivered as a report on every detail that occurred, right down to the precise locations where a dozen stray bullets hit the walls of a theatre.
The novel is written with an odd mixture of omniscient and first person viewpoints. Occasionally, the author jumps to the forefront and becomes the main character. He is searching for the truth of what happened to Ka and the poems he wrote. The author learns of events through letters and notes written by Ka, and through interviews with various characters. In spite of his distant vantage point, he describes the inner workings of Ka's mind. How he could know Ka's every thought and still be a separate character is beyond comprehension. This is one of many inconsistencies that make it difficult to get into the story.
The plot is also assembled in a strange order, with several spoilers. Right in the middle of a passionate love scene, we are pulled out of Ka's hotel room, dropped into the author's world four years later, and told how the story ends. Then we are back in the hotel room listening to the lover's conversation.
After finishing the novel, I reread the cover copy. It's hard to imagine what the reviews were praising, particularly the one that mentioned suspense. The only thing that was still a little bit interesting at the end was why Ka and Ipek made their final choices. Not enough to make the book worth reading.
Book Review: Humorous and humane
Summary: 5 Stars
I usually don't bother to be the 90-somethingth review. But I wouldn't want you to be discouraged by more than 60 reviews behind mine that fail to notice the author's ironic smile on every page of this book. None of his characters escape its illumination, from the Islamist radicals to the Republican coup leader to the female lead (with her out-of-fashion belts and working class way of arranging bread in pyramids) to the urban intellectual protagonist to the author himself. The relationship between the narrator and Ka, the poet protagonist, shares something of that between narrator and poet in Nabokov's "Pale Fire", another book that many readers took at face value when it first was published. But Pamuk's is much the deeper book.
What makes this a novel well worth reading is that Pamuk treats all his characters with sympathy even as he lampoons them (with the possible exception of the coup leader, a ham thespian who tried too hard to play Ataturk). As did Milan Kundera in his early novels, Pamuk interweaves the political and the romantic so closely it's difficult to separate them. But the end result is more politically thought-provoking and humanly touching than Kundera achieved. It's been a long time since I've read contemporary fiction with as much substance as "Snow".
Book Review: I just couldn't take it anymore!
Summary: 1 Stars
I choose this book because I was interested in the political aspects of the story. I stuck with it through almost 250 pages because I kept hoping something would happen to make me want to continue to the end. You should know that I consider not finishing a book a personal failure on my part. I always finish a book but I just couldn't stand it anymore. If you read the plot it sounds interesting but when you read the actual events you are left feelng cheated. I think, for me, the main problem is character development. They have no personality. I'm left just not caring what happens to Ka or Ipek. I had to stop because I never felt like reading a book was such a let down and a waste of time.