“Snow” by Orhan Pamuk

Snow: A Novel

By Orhan Pamuk
2011
460 pages. Audio: 18 hours and 33 minutes
Fiction

—

Orhan Pamuk is one of the world’s greatest living writers and probably one that many of you have never heard of. He has won every prize there is to win, including the Nobel. He is a Turkish writer which not only describes his ethnicity but also his primary topic. More than any other living author, he has traced the travails of a country balancing religious traditionalism and a new modern secular state. He has been in more than occasional trouble in Turkey with the authorities. His body of work has now gotten quite large and much of it is available in English. I suppose that those who have an interest in the part of the world that he describes will find his work more interesting than those who don’t.

But I want to suggest my favorite of his novels that I think any fiction reader will find engrossing. For reasons that I will make clear, it is a great read for ministers. The book is simply entitled Snow. It is translated by Maureen Freely and, while I can’t say anything about the accuracy of the translation, I will say that it reads very well in English.

I can give only the barest outlines of the plot without giving too much away, but it involves a snowbound town cut off from the secular world. The question of headscarves will become central. Sinister police forces will be snooping around. There will be violence; there will be suicide; there will be poetry of course.

This book was originally written in Turkish in 2002 and translated into English in 2004. The book is remarkably prescient in its presentation of the conflict between traditional fundamentalist Islam and the Western secular world. But the book is not just about conflicts with Islam. It has much to say about the ongoing conflict of the secular world with the world of religious conviction. And it certainly might cause you to rethink how you have viewed that conflict and what its future might be.

It is also prophetic in its raising of questions about the traditional view of women in religion generally. It doesn’t seem like that one is going to get worked out anytime soon. But there are also warning signs in this book about oppression of every kind. Oppression demands power, and the contest for power and control in this book, though they are in a place far away in a culture very different from our own, are most unsettling. There are times in the book that feel almost fable-like and I occasionally felt that I could see Kafka peering around the corner. But in the end the book is very much tethered to the world in which we live, and it becomes an eerie page-turner.

My guess is that if you read this book it may not make you want to read everything else Pamuk has written, but it will send you to the internet to find out more about him. You will be glad you read this one.