'Snow' is an amazing novel. Orhan Pamuk has managed to create an intriguing milieu of art, philosophy, religion, politics and human emotions (love,fear,jealousy, guilt to name a few).
I bought this book on an impulse from Strand while on book buying spree. I started reading and was immediately hooked on to it. Ended up reading the complete book making full use of the extended vacation I had taken to be with Meera and Vidush.
The thing I liked the most in the book was Ka's struggle to uncover the pattern of his poetry. He spent more than four years in exile and could not write even a single poem. Back in Kars he suddenly finds himself in the grip of strange force and ends up writing 19 poems in about 4 days time ! And then he goes back to Frankfurt and spends another four years in trying the decipher the pattern of those poems. His final solution of arranging his poems along the axes of a snowflake was so beautiful (a nice picture at the end of Chapter 39 depicts this quite vividly) . The underlying symmetry of a snowflake that he was always fascinated by also helps him understand himself and his poems. Philosophis of life like the one below also emerge.
Every life is like a snowflake
While I was enjoying the book, I kept wondering if reading the work in Turkish would have had any different effect. Would there be some kind of loss during the translation process - would the ideas and thoughts that the author was trying to covey represented as accurately in the English version. Of course, someone who has read the book in both Turkish and English only can shed more light on this.
I will end with another littel gem from the book
Life is a meaningless string of random incidents.
No comments:
Post a Comment