Orhan Pamuk – Snow

2454 Words10 Pages
In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. The novel vividly portrays the cruelty and intolerance of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the representatives of the secularist Turkish state. More importantly, Pamuk has created believable, sympathetic characters that represent both sides of the divided country and has given expressive voice to their anger and frustration. These are ordinary human beings who actually have much more in common than they would wish to acknowledge. Snow is a book about the difficulties faced by a nation torn between tradition, religion, and modernization. Set in the far east of Turkey, the locals are certain that in Western eyes they're all considered ignorant yokels. After reading Pamuk’s Snow thoroughly, we can see that he mixes various events that make reading the story feel alive and different from other plays and novels. The uniqueness can be seen through the changing topics, such as Islam, secularism, God, love, and art. The story manages to put many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and successfully combines humor, social commentary, and deep sympathy with its characters into a nutshell. In Snow, a Poet Ka returns to his home country of Turkey after more than ten years away. When he comes home he hopes to find an old love that he left behind, a woman named Ipek, who was recently separated from her husband. There are also a large number of female suicides that he hopes to dig a little deeper into and find the real reasoning’s behind the deaths of the young women. What he didn’t expect to come back to was tension within the government and individuals of Turkey. During the ten years that Ka was gone, Turkey started to go through a struggle between religion and secularism, the feeling of a country needing to change to be more like other countries. They were
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