Orhan Pamuk - Snow

This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels. Acclaim for Orhan Pamuk'sSnow "Powerful.... Astonishingly timely.... A deft melding of political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir.... [ Snow] is forever confounding our expectations." -- Vogue "A novel of profound relevance to the present moment. is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses." -- The Times (London) "A work of art.... is conducted with subtle, painful insight into the human weakness that can underlie both impulses." -- The Times (London) "A work of art....

Alternating between the snowstorm's hush and philosophical conversations reminiscent of Dostoevsky's great novels, Snow proves a... timely and gripping read." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "Marvelous... as quiet and transformative as a blizzard and as coldly beautiful." -- St. Petersburg Times "In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?... The author's high artistry and fierce politics take our minds further into the age's crisis than any commentator could.

Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented." -- The Daily Telegraph (London) "Part political thriller, part farce, Snow is [ Pamuk's] most dazzling fiction yet. One of the top books of the year." -- The Village Voice "It comes as no surprise that political prescience should be yet another of the many gifts of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. With Snow, Pamuk gives convincing proof that the solitary artist is a better bellwether than any televised think-tanker.... The work is a melancholy farce full of rabbit-out-of-a-hat plot twists that, despite the locale, looks uncannily like the magic lantern show of misfire, denial and pratfall that appears daily in our newspapers." -- Independent on Sunday "Pure magic.... Snow is excellent." -- San Francisco Chronicle " 'How much can we ever know about love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?' Such questions haunt the poet Ka... [in] this novel [that is] as much about love as it is about politics." -- The Observer ( London) "Snow has already been a bestseller in Turkey--given Pamuk's stature as a novelist and the novel's content it could hardly fail to be.

But what makes it a brilliant novel is its artistry. Pamuk keeps so many balls in the air that you cannot separate the inquiry into the nature of religious belief from the examination of modern Turkey, the investigation of East-West relations, and the nature of art itself.... All this rolled into a gripping political thriller." -- The Spectator "Brilliant.... Pamuk writes with such grace and deep respect for his conflicted characters that this rich novel passes like a dream, encompassing every aspect of love and belief." -- People Orhan Pamuk Snow Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

My Name Is RedThe White CastleThe New LifeThe Black BookIstanbulSnowSnow Orhan Pamuk Translated from the Turkish by Maureen FreelyVintage BooksA Division of Random House, Inc.New York F I R S T V I N T A G E I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D I T I O N , A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 Translation copyright (c) 2004 by Alfred A.My Name Is Red The White Castle The New Life The Black Book Istanbul Snow Snow Orhan Pamuk Translated from the Turkish by Maureen FreelyVintage BooksA Division of Random House, Inc.New York F I R S T V I N T A G E I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D I T I O N , A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 Translation copyright (c) 2004 by Alfred A.

Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Turkey as Kar by Ileti,sim, Istanbul, in 2002. Copyright 2002 Ileti,sim Yayincilik A. , S. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A.

Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004. Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Pamuk, Orhan [date] [Kar, English] Snow / Orhan Pamuk ; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely--1st American ed. p. cm. I.

Freely, Maureen, [date] II. Title. PL248.P34K36513 2004 894'.3533--dc22 2003065935 eISBN-13: 978-0-307-38647-2eISBN-10: 0-307-38647-3Book design by Robert C. Olsson www.vintagebooks.com v1.0 To Ruya Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist. --Robert Browning, "Bishop Blougram's Apology" Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore.

We are about to speak of very ugly matters. --Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma Richard Howard's translation Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people. --Dostoevsky, notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov The Westerner in me was discomposed. --Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

ContentsSnowThe Silence of Snow the journey to kars The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.

He'd boarded the bus from Erzurum to Kars with only seconds to spare. He'd just come into the station on a bus from Istanbul--a snowy, stormy, two-day journey--and was rushing up and down the dirty wet corridors with his bag in tow, looking for his connection, when someone told him the bus for Kars was leaving immediately. He'd managed to find it, an ancient Magirus, but the conductor had just shut the luggage compartment and, being "in a hurry," refused to open it again. That's why our traveler had taken his bag on board with him; the big dark-red Bally valise was now wedged between his legs. He was sitting next to the window and wearing a thick charcoal coat he'd bought at a Frankfurt Kaufhof five years earlier. We should note straightaway that this soft, downy beauty of a coat would cause him shame and disquiet during the days he was to spend in Kars, while also furnishing a sense of security.

As soon as the bus set off, our traveler glued his eyes to the window next to him; perhaps hoping to see something new, he peered into the wretched little shops and bakeries and broken-down coffeehouses that lined the streets of Erzurum's outlying suburbs, and as he did it began to snow. It was heavier and thicker than the snow he'd seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn't been so tired, if he'd paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen

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