Snow Book

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red (â??a sumptuous thrillerâ?â??John Updike; â??chockful of sublimity and sinâ?â??New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearningsâ??for love, art, power, and Godâ??set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his motherâ??s funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writerâ??s curiosityâ??a frozen sea these many yearsâ??leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Kaâ??s motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Kaâ??s youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Kaâ??s frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for loveâ??or at least a wifeâ??that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and dutiesRead More