Snow

It's a little unnerving to read a book entitled Snow while the weather around you toggles between 90 and sunny and 50 and rainy. Especially when the author truly evokes an icy snowscape.

But I'm getting into the review before the disclaimer, which is: I will not be able to do this book justice. Orhan Pamuk defies my abilities.

Snow dominates the novel - shutting the roads and isolating the little town of Kars from the rest of Turkey; and more importantly, providing the hero with the blueprint for his final book of poems. Ka, a exiled poet acting as journalist, has been suffering from writer's block, but upon his arrival the poems begin falling like snowflakes. And he arranges them as on a snowflake, creating the unique pattern that makes up his soul.

But of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In three days, Kars plays host to an array of interlocking love stories and betrayals, suicides, murder, epiphanies, political intrigue, religious extremism, a coup, and two plays with shocking denouements. It's too much to even begin to recount. And doppelgangers abound. Ka, in Kars in search of a story and his own happiness, is mirrored later by the narrator, a novelist named Orhan, who too comes to Kars in search of a story. The interplay of the snowflake's singularity and the characters' doubles could make a great topic for a paper...

I don't think Pamuk is for everyone. He packs an immense amount of detail, plot, character into each page - not really beach reading, despite my attempt at a half hour in Huntington Beach. You have to be willing to devote yourself to the story, a requirement that led me to take much longer than I expected to finish reading. But he is immensely rewarding - somehow he can tell you in advance how it ends and still make it a surprise. He is just lovely.