Snowfall

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Here’s how he sets a scene: “The library had the look of a place that no one had been in for a very long time, and today it wore a put-upon aspect, as though indignant that its solitude should be so suddenly and so rudely violated. The glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls stared before them coldly, and the books stood shoulder to shoulder in an attitude of mute resentment. The mullioned windows were set into deep granite embrasures, and snow-light glared through their numerous tiny leaded panes. Strafford had already cast a skeptical eye on the architecture of the place. Arts-and- Crafts fakery, he had thought straight off, with a mental sniff. He wasn't a snob, not exactly, only he likes things to be left as they were, and not got up as what they could never hope to be.”

Most of the local communities have a common enemy - the state. The state, since the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, has attempted to replace rather than include local communities within itself. But it is merely a source of what we have come to know in the age of Trump as 'fake news.' Moreover, also as in the Trumpian vein, the state is an aspiring religion, with the sovereign power that all other religions would like to have. It uses this power and legal violence to present a binary choice to the population: ‘My Fatherland or My Headscarf.’ While I had so many other books to catch up with, I couldn't stop myself from requesting this latest novel from John Banville, although it's a police procedural/thriller. Well, you're not going to get that from this book. You'll get the narrator going on and on about snow, about how beautiful Ipek is and even what seems like it would be interesting; the conflict between religion and secularism, women's rights and poetry IT'S NOT! Because this book focuses on the dull, bland main character Ka.

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The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow..." Making the horrible mistake of trying to read this book again. It's awful. Bad enough you'd die of alcohol poisoning drinking the weakest alcohol if you drank every time you saw the word snow in this book but I am at a part where an extremist takes a gun to a principal and goes on and on about head scarves and how girls wearing headscarves will keep them from being raped or harass. He goes on about how headscarves help a man respect a woman. Over the last 18 years, we've published books that have sold in the tens of thousands. We've also published books that have only sold a handful of copies: such is independent publishing. But we have taken a searing pride in each and every one of them. And we have been a foundry for emerging talent.

How is every single character in this book obnoxious and annoying? Every woman just exists as some man's fantasy. Men in this book think they are in love because they see a pretty woman and go *boing* you are not in love, Ka, you're just horny! You don't even know this woman. You re like, come with me to Frankfurt. Ok, and what will you do for her? She has to leave her elderly father which you made go out on a dangerous mission so you could have bad sex with his daughter! You just want a mother you can make love to! All through the book Ka sees people get killed, sees the body of teenagers and all he can think about is sex with Ipek! It has snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides. People said it was unheard of, that they had never known weather like it, that it was the worst winter in living memory. But they said that every year when it snowed, and also in years when it didn’t snow.The author inexplicably tried his hardest to make the novel seem like a biography even though A NOVEL is featured prominently on the cover. The ultimate twist in the story broke my heart enough to send me into a state of absolute remorse. Yes, it suits the story perfectly and gives it another perfectly beautiful edge, but it broke my heart nonetheless. And it will continue to do so for as long as I remember this story, which I hope, will be a really long time. While this book is much more about telling than showing during a large part of it, readers do get glimpses of poverty, hopelessness, anger, regrets, freedom of thought, the loss of innocence, and loneliness, and the search for happiness along with the other themes mentioned above. It is researched well and reasonably well-written, but somewhat slow. However, the author does a self-insertion into the story which I did not like. He’s hit a dry spell but his muse strikes in Kars and he writes a series of poems, or, we are told, 'they write themselves' through his hands in a trance-like state. But he’s very analytical for a poet – we’re shown a geometric diagram he creates to show the relationships among his poems. He’s also obsessed with examining his level of happiness, deliberately trying to improve his happiness, and we all know where that leads. This novel contains so many different strands, I am hopelessly incapable of reviewing it. Ever since I first read it, just after Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize, it has been one of my most cherished literary treasures, a book full of truth and lies, of foolishness and wisdom, of love and hate, of passion and indifference. A book full of LIFE!

Imagine to my surprise then that Snow is not only a crime novel to boot, but a detective potboiler of the kind that Agatha Christie churned out in her sleep. However, we soon realise we are not in Christie territory anymore: The moody, introverted Strafford keeps his mouth shut and lets the play unfold, gazing out at the purity of snow in the fields outside and contrasting it with the slime he keeps uncovering inside the house. The goal of the exercise becomes clear once the pressure to swap everything under the rug begins to be applied from up high: Banville wants to replace the ‘cozy’ part of the mystery with the ‘sleazy’ reality of a whole society ready to deceive itself. And in addition to all that, the small details in Banville's writing are so pleasurable. I especially liked the way he introduces us to characters:Each of these communities, according to their members, is created by God. Various physical aspects of the Karsian world evoke God for the various communities. For example, “Snow reminds Ka of God!” Particularly its silence. But this is his community; mainly because after living as an emigre in Germany for so many years, he has no other. In Kars, he finds solace mainly because he has discovered empathy "with someone weaker than himself," namely the poor, uneducated, confused provincial Turkish folk. But that isn't how the locals see things. At that point, the freedom is, 'I'm just going to sit, and I'm going to drink, and I'm going to ignore the world.' He's not going to try to do it again. He's not going to try to kiss the Colombians' ass to get stepped on cocaine," Andron says. "He's not going to go get some job. He's not going to do any of it. He's done, but he is still doing it his way. And it's really heartbreaking." As a fellow poet, I hated that the main character wrote 19 poems throughout the novel, but the reader never got to read any of them. This point is explained in the story, but it still bugged me. This story has no cohesion. Things happen to the main character without foreshadowing. The exposition that did come was mainly philosophical and seemingly tangential. And if I have to read another sentence about whether a Muslim woman should wear a scarf or not or how beautiful and terrifying snow can be, I will go batty. In addition to that last passage quoted, characters are forever noting that their situation feels fictional: