Do you ever get to a point in a book when you absolutely
know that there’s no chance in hell you’re going to finish it? I eat such
points for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or so I thought.
I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow on my commutes to work and
honestly, the last two times I had to try really hard to stop myself from dozing
off on the shoulder next to mine. True story.
It started off being poetic – The Silence of Snow – when we
meet a poet who hasn’t written anything substantial in four years. His name is
Ka and he’s going to Kars and in case you aren’t Turkish or a Wikipedia addict,
the word for snow in the language is Kar. So we meet Ka (funny, the first few
times I read his name I couldn’t help think of Kaa the snake from Kipling’s
Jungle Book) who has journeyed all the way to Kars, a decrepit city towards
eastern Turkey to cover the local elections and to investigate an “epidemic” of
suicides for an Istanbul based newspaper. Or so he’d like to have people believe. In reality, he’s there to find
Ipek, a beautiful woman from college whom he wasn’t in love with but remembers as
being very beautiful. Maybe if he marries her he will write poems again. Or maybe he'll encounter misery and he'll write really beautiful poems again. If nothing else, at least the strife, poverty and the miserable
beauty of snow will intervene.
Ka whispered to the girls that Kars was an extraordinarily quiet city.
'That's because we're afraid of our own voices,' said Hande.
'That,' said Ipek, 'is the silence of snow.'
So where in the book am I as this feeble attempt at a rant is being written? The
revolution has begun and having rested his head in Ipek’s lap for a few minutes
Ka is on his way to The Rooms of Terror. I don’t know why I’m not inclined to
go on. It’s not like I hate the book. If anything, I like it! It’s just that
the intensity of the symbolism is getting to me. The poetry of the unfolding plot -- revealing to us all those who die following their conversations with
Ka about their dreams and desires blissfully unaware of what is to happen in
two hours and twenty seven minutes… Then there’s the snow itself and Ka’s
convoluted associations of it with God, the West, the East, love, hope, death ,
religion, revolution and who knows what else! It’s blanketing everything in its
wake, according to the imagery, and yet it isn’t freezing anything stiff. If
anything it's serving to unify all the houses, people, themes and motifs. Maybe
that was Pamuk’s intention.
Beautiful as it sounds – The Silence of Snow – I’m going to
put this on my Bookshelf because sometimes, silence can be as jarring as a five
year old playing the drums! Or maybe this read requires a different setting
than the one I’m in right now. Somewhere quiet where I can peacefully allow
myself to be transported to Kars, to soak in the tale of the conflicted poet who hasn't got a clue, but believes the poetry is coming out of his eyes, ears and fingers and if he doesn't get it down in the nick of time it'll be lost forever. Yes, I’m giving up… for now… I must… before I go Little Match Girl
on myself. (*Breathes*)
No comments:
Post a Comment