Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

And the quiet of this empty city was as if the world had come to an end, and it was snowing.


If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.

He walked the city in the cold, alone with his poems. Around him, snowflakes formed a blanket of white silence. He traversed Kars, a remote city in Turkey, where he found the poor forgotten, where democracy he saw was nonexistent and the Western world shunned. He, a prodigal son, never fully welcomed, a loner misunderstood, a man with the sort of angst only seen clearly through poetry. There, like the snow, he walked the city quietly, thoughtfully, observantly, deliberately, and Kars became his muse.

But- just as the poem itself defies easy explanation - it is difficult to say how much he decided at that moment and how much of his life was determined by the hidden symmetries this book is seeking to unveil.

Can one ever know the underpinnings of a man's heart when he is in love with a woman at the same time he is in love with the art of poetry? What explains best the shards of a person's soul when he is faced with a home no longer familiar, a city no longer his, a woman who was never his, a mindset unique from that of his peers? Loneliness and despondency are certainly themes in this book, as Ka is faced with those darkening thoughts, even as he experiences moments of euphoria. Politics and religion are bigger themes threaded in each chapter and the socio-political-economic climate unfolds with consistency. This is not the easiest book to maneuver, not the simplest unfolding of plots, but it certainly is intriguing to visit the mind of a political exile, to visit the daily lives of characters trapped behind vocal cages within their own homeland.