🦋 Some quotes from Snow
Those lines I was looking for yesterday, from the first two pages: If he hadn't been so tired, if he'd paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.But the thought didn't even cross his mind. Some more good stuff from the first chapter: "I'm an old friend of Ka's, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars." (Aside: I wonder what's up with the assonance between "Ka" and "Kars" -- it threatens to be distractingly cutesy. Does the pronunciation of "Kars" rhyme with "Mars" or with "parse", or something different?) "After a lifetime in which every experience of love was touched by shame and suffering, the prospect of falling in love filled Ka with an intense, almost instinctive dread." Chapter 3 opens with a description of what has led Ka to make this journey, which makes it sound sort of like a search for "the real Turkey" -- I was extrapolating to my own experience to think, it sounds a little like if I, beset by mid-life depression, made a trip to (say) Kentucky looking for the real America, which America is completely alien to me. More extrapolation: Ka's fear of fundamentalist Islam is like my fear of fundamentalist Christianity and what it's doing to America. But, I don't want to commit to this reading yet, I don't know that it's going to be at all useful in understanding the book. Ka's blurted confession in Chapter 4 has me loving him. It is the first point where he is fully human.
Snarkout tells me, "The Ka/Kars thing will not get less irritating,although it's a pun in Turkish; Kars is a real city in northeast Turkey, 'kar' is 'snow', so snow is what lies between Ka and Kars."
posted morning of Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
➳ More posts about Snow
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Ah, thanks. I wondered about the Ka/Kars thing too. I did wonder what we missed in the translation. (BTW What part of the US do you live in - don't tell me if you wish it to be private - I've lived in the US a couple of times)
posted morning of July first, 2009 by whisperinggums
In New Jersey, not far from NYC.
posted morning of July first, 2009 by Jeremy
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