Reading group: Snow by Orhan Pamuk is March's book

Declared essential by Margaret Atwood, this atmospheric novel translated from Turkish has emerged as this month’s choice

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow has emerged as our choice of translated novel to read this month. Since most of us in the UK have recently experienced a great deal of the white stuff, this novel sounds like an apt choice. As the Guardian’s 2004 review explains:

Orhan Pamuk’s new novel is set in the early 1990s in Kars, a remote and dilapidated city in eastern Anatolia famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation and Russian imperial rule than for its spectacularly awful weather. Snow, “kar” in Turkish, falls incessantly on the treeless plains and the castle, river and boulevards of Kars, which the local scholars say takes its name from “karsu” (snow-water).

But this novel also offers more than meteorological weather. Pamuk’s follow-up to the astonishing My Name Is Red deals with the conflict between a secular state and Islamic government, the perpetually vexed questions around the wearing of headscarves, and questions of truth and faith and belonging. When she reviewed the book in the New York Times, Margaret Atwood called Snow “not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times”.

Atwood stressed that this book is a serious artistic achievement. Pamuk is a wonderful storyteller, and someone who is always playing with the form of the novel: “The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they’re approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile – these are vintage Pamuk.”

While we’re still with the New York Times, it’s also worth noting that the Old Grey Lady named Snow one of its books of the year in 2004 (when it was first published in English, following its 2002 release in Turkey), and it won the 2005 Prix Médicis. It would take too long to list Pamuk’s other prizes and achievements, but you should certainly also know that he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2006.

Finally, just to add to the good news, Snow was translated into English by Maureen Freely, the renowned translator, novelist and occasional Guardian contributor. It’s going to be a fascinating month and I hope you’ll join us.

Thanks to Faber, we have five copies of Snow to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Phill Langhorne with your address and your account username (phill.langhorne@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to him, too.

Contributor

Sam Jordison

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