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It is not often as I close the pages of a book, I am choked up and in tears, as with the literary fiction masterpiece by Orhan Pamuk, Snow. This internationally acclaimed writer painstakingly explores the collision of Western values with Islamic fundamentalism, and this prescient book, published in 2005, could have been written today. Its truths are timeless with disparate yearnings for love and art and power and God. With an omniscient narrator, we come to know Kerim Alakusoglu known as Ka, after many years of political exile in Germany. Ka is a well-connected man and a poet when he returns to Istanbul for his mother’s funeral and then travels to the remote, impoverished, and provincial town of Kars near the Armenian border. There is a seemingly endless snowfall, the fiercest in memory, shutting all the roads and access to the town and to the modern and westernized world. Nationalists are stirring up hatred and tension. Kars feels increasingly cut off from the rest of the world and reality. Additionally, there has been a rash of suicides in young women forbidden to wear their head scarves that has stirred political and ethnic debate. Ka is also drawn into the maelstrom of a military coup underway to restrain the local rebels and bring them under control. Ka is also reunited with his beautiful former schoolmate Ipek as he entertains a possible romance and her returning with him to Germany as his wife.

Having been blocked for some time in his art, Ka is moved by the poems that are coming to him in this snowed-in remote area of Turkey as he records them in his green notebook as well as making numerous notes of his experiences and the people he encounters. The last of his nineteen poems, he entitles “The Place Where the World Ends.�� The significance of the snow is present throughout the book creating a powerful metaphor with its attendant cleansing, silence, obliteration, and sleep as one witnesses the beauty and mystery of creation. Orhan Pamuk brings an understanding of people in this book as we feel the yearning, fears and the sadness of these characters, as well as hope. And this may be why Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2006.

“As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world.��

“Those sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place where the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.��

“The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.��