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At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy - or hüzün - that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
Since his boyhood Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of 12 he comes to Istanbul - "the center of the world" - and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza on the street and hoping to become rich like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side.
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged 18, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy - or hüzün - that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
Since his boyhood Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of 12 he comes to Istanbul - "the center of the world" - and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza on the street and hoping to become rich like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side.
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged 18, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.
In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.
The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan.
In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan's grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf - and the doctor's illegitimate son.
Our guide to the Goldens' world is their neighbor René, an ambitious young filmmaker. Researching a movie about the Goldens, he ingratiates himself into their household. Seduced by their mystique, he is inevitably implicated in their quarrels, their infidelities, and, indeed, their crimes. Meanwhile, like a bad joke, a certain comic-book villain embarks upon a crass presidential run that turns New York upside-down.
Salman Rushdie holds the literary world in awe with a jaw-dropping catalog of critically acclaimed novels that have made him one of the world's most celebrated authors. Winner of the prestigious Booker of Bookers, Midnight's Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of India's independence.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
When Constance Reid's new husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, returns from war paralyzed and in a wheelchair, she sees her future wither. As their marriage grows loveless, she mourns the desires fated to go unfulfilled. But a stirring fascination with Oliver Mellors, the estate's coarse, taciturn gamekeeper, blooms into feelings she feared had died. Soon the lovers find themselves entangled in scandal, and their taboo affair becomes as pernicious as it is passionate.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly", tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War.
Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin - he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills - meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella, the first book published by Philip Roth, explores issues of both class and Jewish assimilation into American culture. It won the National Book Award in 1960.
The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.
Birds Without Wings is the story of a small town in Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the men and women (Armenians, Christians, and Muslims) whose lives are intertwined and rooted there: Iskander, the potter and local fount of wisdom; Philotei, the Christian girl of legendary beauty, courted almost from infancy by Ibrahim the goatherd, a great love that culminates in tragedy and madness; and many more.
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, and now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, Westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love, or at least a wife, that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate.
In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.
"Ka's rediscovery of God and poetry in a desolate place makes the novel's sadness profound and moving." (Publishers Weekly)
"Pamuk's gift for the evocative image remains one of this novel's great pleasures: Long after I finished this book, in the blaze of the Washington summer, my thoughts kept returning to Ka and Ipek in the hotel room, looking out at the falling snow." (Ruth Franklin, Washington Post Book World)
Orhan Pamuk is both a brilliant and an intensely frustrating writer, and _Snow_ demonstrates this ambiguity full-tilt. His depiction of Kars--the details he lavishes on it--fully immerses us in small-town Eastern Turkey, with its heartbreak and dignity, corruption and sweet naivete. He honestly admits that it may well be impossible for Westerners (or Western Turks) to fully comprehend. His plot is complex, his love story bittersweet, his characters memorable, his political commentary quite pointed. AND THEN he makes the same points, lavishes us with the same details, weaves the same sidetracks, dissects the same characters, over and over and over again. His protagonist Ka cannot stop talking, his narrator "Orhan" is even worse, and as in every novel I have read of Pamuk's (most of them), I find myself wishing desperately that he had a more severe editor. He is brilliant; how much more stunning would he be with one-third fewer pages?
Listening to an audiobook helps this process, and the reader for _Snow_ is quite good.
23 of 24 people found this review helpful
I found the book to be a window into the mystery of the Turkish mind as it wrestles with Islam. Set in a snow storm, it is haunting and surreal throughout. It may take a couple chapters to get into so be patient.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
I haven't read any other of Pamuk's works, but this book by itself proves him worthy of the nobel prize. His way of describing the surroundings, the athmosphere and the general mood really draws you in and takes you there. Pamuk also proves himself a mastermind of story telling. This is a deep, intriguing and engaging story. Great to listen to during the winter (especially here in Norway). I highly recommend it.
The narrator is great by the way.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
An exotic look into a culture that few western readers are likely to discover otherwise, translated and read with a feeling for making the strange familar and the familar strange. The "dramatic" coup is underlined by the enigmatic ending that leaves the reader wondering where the lines are drawn between what is real, what we invent for our own, various purposes, and what other perceive as reality. Pamuk well deserves his Nobel.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful
After reading "Istanbul - Memories and the City" by Orhan Pamuk I knew that his Snow would be a great reading. But the impression I had greatly outgrown my expectations. The book's plot is set in the eastern, border city of Kars (BTW, Kar means Snow in Turkish), the city that bears the memories of its Russian, Georgian and Armenian past. A poet, named Ka, returns to Kars after long life in Istanbul and in Germany. He meets here his love, witnesses a political/religious murder, faces the mysterious young women suicides and gets involved in the conflict - which is no less than the main Turkish conflict between secularism and violent religious extremism - on a microscale. When it comes to this very conflict, still so important in Turkey and other Islamic countries - he is really even-handed. He spurns the murderous nature of some of Islamists, while he condemns despicable and completely unjustified action of Turkish army that led to a military coup in the city.
In beautiful narration, Pamuk uncovers the motifs of both sides, contemplates the deep philosophical questions, and shows how human emotions of love, hatred and jealousy cast shadow on the historical events.
The thread of love between the main protagonist and beautiful, yet troubled woman is described with such truth and tenderness, without false pretence of romantic innocence - that I must say it was one of most beautiful yet not-naive love story I ever read.
The language of Snow is simple but beautiful; the poetry is in flow of thought more than in words and sentences.
Last and not least - Pamuk is another great story teller - at some moment of the book, about 2/3 of it, we are suddenly exposed to the tragic finale of the plot. I was almost sure the book ends just then, or it will no longer be worth reading. However, at this moment the story starts to be even more intriguing, and the fact the reader knows the end - not only spoils the reading - but makes it even more fascinating.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful
Orhan Pamuk masterfully illustrates the fate of one whom misses his last chance for love. This tragedy is set in a polarized political and religious climate, that lends excitement and illumination to the underlying character analysis.
The book is not one you can turn up to 3x speed and breeze through. I struggled a little with some of the themes, but at the end of the day I really enjoyed this unique world presented in Snow. The story twists and turns and finds truth along the way!
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
[rating = A+]
One of my: Best Books of the Year (for 2016)
I have had this novel on my shelf for some time. I actually got around to reading it as an audio book which actually made it more enjoyable. Orhan Pamuk is an incredible writer. He mixes contemporary issues and the art of the tale to create a brilliant work of art. Written as if Orhan is writing a travel-journey for an old friend, Snow takes place in Kars Turkey. The protagonist Ka, a poet of some repute, has came to write about the "Suicide girls", and this is where the political and religious angles come in. The whole story is built around the problem of the Islamists and how they are perceived in their own country and in the West (whose own image is rather condescending and mean). Throughout the novel, Orhan, the mysterious speaker, slowly becomes more present in the narration. I am still not sure if I like this intrusion, or if I think it masterfully constrained. Snow deals with a roguish terrorist Blue, two sister, Kadife and Ipek, and several naïve school boys, who all inspire Ka to write poems about his experiences in Kars. What most impressed me about the novel, is the shear feat of story-telling. In the 5th chapter, Pamuk does something very unorthodox and brings it off magnificently; it is a dialogue between two people, one who is killed by the other, and which discusses the main plot-driving force, religion-controlled vs state-controlled. The prose is swift and crafted to perfection, nothing superfluous, and the image of snow in every chapter may seem tiresome, but it really adds a layer of continuation that helps to drive the narration. A wonderful book, exciting and heart-felt: Orhan Pamuk cares deeply about his country and its place in the world.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Splendid story about East and West, seeking personal happiness versus living by belief and principle, the local versus the cosmopolitan, as well as much beauty and art, love and longing.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Secularist vs. Islamic Fundamentalist, with an imperfect and complex man in the middle.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I listen to books while I am driving as I commute many miles each day. I nearly crashed my car over and over again as this book was putting me to sleep. The reader has a melodic british accent which fit the book perfectly but the content was redundant. I waited 5 months and listened to the book on shorter road trips which proved to be safer. I finally finished the book but part 3 proved to be the most interesting. If you can get through part 1 and 2 then by all means don't miss part 3.
6 of 9 people found this review helpful