Sunday, December 5, 2010

Snow - a Turkish political love story...

The book 'Snow' from Orhan Pamuk tells the story of a Turkish poet, who emigrated to Germany, visiting Turkey for a few days. Due to heavy snow storms, he get stucked in a little town where a local coup d'état takes place. While he gets sucked into politics against his will, he falls in love with a woman. Although he was an atheist, he feels attracted by Islam and produces poem after poem as if they would have been whispered into his ear by god himself.

The story of the poet is told by a friend. Although the friend is not involved, he resembles a similar character being protagonist of another and yet the same story but with a different ending. This theme reoccurs several times in the book for different characters. Those paired characters, whose life trajectories cross each other, demonstrate the impact of coincidences by an arbitrary perturbation of the behavior of one of them. As this perturbation changes the trajectory crucially - and often with only limited influence of the character - it states a certain arbitrariness and passiveness of life. Passiveness comes into the picture because the results of actions cannot be predicted. The world looks like a chaos and it might be as sensible to be active than to be passive - and this closes the circle to religion. Though, the reader can predict many outcomes. Thus, it might rather be the relativistic perspective than the state of the world.

This beautiful technique, humorous style, interesting political and religious discussion and a thrilling climax until the end of the books, makes it absolutely worth reading!