Snow (again)

So I just finished reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (who allegedly sounds like a dalmation). The book was actually originally written in Turkish, and the version I read was, obviously, a translation, and a pretty damn good one at that. Snow got Pamuk the nobel prize in literture recently. The story itself is about Ka, a liberal Turk who's lived in Germany for years, and who returns to the small, desolate town of Kars in Turkey. The book centers around the two or three days Ka spent in Kars, and his ventures into love, religion, politics, and his own soul.

I have mixed feelings about the book. There were moments when I simply couldn't put it down, and had to see what happened next. There were other sections of the book that, unfortunately, dwelt too much into politics, and to be honest, that bores the hell out of me. I've never had a good appreciation for politics, and mostly find it too dry. Nopes, human emotion and psychology are what get my gears turning, and I'll tell ya, snow has oodles and oodles of them.

But it's beyond that. Ka, the main character, is a poet, and driven by his emotion, not his mind. In a lot of ways, I'm like Ka, and because of Pamuk's amazing powers of description, I seemed to feel everything that Ka felt. Pamuk, the writer, was holding up a mirror and shouting, "Over here, fucker! This is what you look like! This is what you do! Pretty? Not!" And it's not pretty, no sir...those enslaved by their own emotions are often self-destructive, like giant, flaming stars that wind up imploding into themselves.

And that's the scary thing. There's a logical part of me who scoffs at Ka, calling him a self-lacerating, pessimistic fool. But there's also that writer inside me who smiles with a sad understanding at the way Ka's mental states twist and turn, and secretly knows that his fate could have been no different.

There is heavy snowfall in Kars throughout the novel. In the comfort of my blanket, Pamuk's description of the cold and the snowflakes seems so poetic. Ka mentions once in the novel how strangely silent everything is when snow begins to fall (provided, of course, that a blizzard isn't blowing up your ass). Ka describes it as the 'silence of God.' How beautiful!

Even though the landscape Pamuk sketched of the snow made me want to catch the next flight to Turkey, I've never gotten along well with US winters. I like the snowfall, and even the cold to some extent. What I can't stand though, what freezes my marrow, are the gusts of wind. Icy puffs from the maw of a snow troll they are, and a terrible troll at that. On windy winter days, even seconds spent outside are unbearable. Hell, I'm sure if I took a piss outside on one of these days, it would freeze in mid-air.

The other thing I can't stand is the trees in winter. All their leaves have fallen off by this point, and they look like black, charred death. The winter landscape here in New England is so bleak and...desolate. Like an arctic wasteland. There's nothing romantic or poetic about it, and believe me, I've tried looking. I've been peering my eyes for the last six years.