Book #3

I finally finished reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow yesterday. Was the book good? Yes. Was it an important read for Westerners? Yes. Am I glad I read it? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Considering I kept reading my New Yorkers cover to cover and taking naps whenever I got a seat on the el, I think the answer is apparent.

Perhaps my biggest block was the translation. I don't read Turkish, or anything else besides English and 8th grade-level French, but I can still imagine it was better in Turkish. Even not speaking the original language I can typically tell when a translation is good and when it is crappy. Whoever translates David Grossman's novels from Hebrew is fantastic. Ditto this translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Although I love Calvino I can tell most translations of his work that I've read are crap (of course, I was poor during my Calvino phase, scouring used book stores for any dog-eared paperback I could find for under $5). With Snow, I couldn't tell if I didn't like the author's voice or the translator's voice.

The novel traces the return of a Turkish poet in political exile to his native country, as he travels to a far flung province, Kars. In Kars he is snowed in and cut off from the world. There, his writer's block ends, he falls passionately in love and becomes entangled with political struggles between extreme Islamists and various Republican factions. For me, the most touching and important passages involve the protagonist's friendships with two Islamicist teenage boys, one who is killed during a coup in a theatre. The love story felt a little flat to me, mostly because all his desperation and hope was thrown in the direction of a beautiful female object and it was doomed, and not in a romantic way, from the start.

Now I can pick up my reading pace again.