The READIN Family Album
Me and Sylvia at the Memorial (April 2009)

READIN

Jeremy's journal

Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream -- a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows -- is essentially poetry.

Michel Leiris


(This is a page from my archives)
Front page
More recent posts
Older posts
More posts about:
Snow
Orhan Pamuk
Readings

Archives index
Subscribe to RSS

This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)

🦋 Musing on Snow

Musing on Snow: I have been doing little else for weeks now, at least here in this space. What about the ending? It must be said, this is a very bleak novel -- a bleak view of Ka's life and of the situtation in Turkey. Fazıl's words in the final chapter do a little to mitigate the sense of bleakness as regards Turkey, and to make it seem like I am having that reaction because I am not familiar with the mores. But: the novel is primarily about Ka -- I think so, and Pamuk at least appears to think so as evidenced by his words in chapter 29.

So: a novel about Ka (and possibly about his reflection in Necip and Fazıl), and a fairly depressing one. But the dread in reading it was also a very sweet experience. And the thinking ahead that Pamuk makes me do was also lovely in its way, kind of like solving a crossword puzzle. I'm not sure right now, what I make of chapter 43, the last chapter but one, which did not concern Ka much -- I guess it was sort of directed at wrapping up the story, I don't think in a totally satisfactory way. It's not clear to me whether İpek and Kadife are fully characters in their own right, or foils for Ka like most everyone else in the book; it could be that if I understood the final two chapters better, I would see that they were fully realized characters.

posted morning of Monday, August 20th, 2007
➳ More posts about Snow
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
➳ More posts about Readings

Respond:

Name:
E-mail:
(will not be displayed)
Link:
Remember info

Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
    •
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.

Where to go from here...

Texts
Programming
Woodworking
Music
South Orange
Friends and Family
Blogs
Comix
readinsinglepost