Probably the best line in “Tootsie” is at the very end. All the shenanigans of the hundred and one different side stories collide during the live TV broadcast of “SouthWest General.” Everyone gasps. There’s a pregnant pause. And then Bill Murray slams it out of the park. “That is one nutty hospital!” Orhan Pamuk’s award winning novel “Snow” also ends with a high-stakes “we’re all in” live TV broadcast, and when I put the book down I was left with a similar thought. “That is one nutty culturally divergent country!”
The country in question is Turkey — and if you thought the US with its “blue states” and “red states” was polarized, well, we’re practically all giving each other back rubs and singing tunes by The Youngbloods in comparison. The insane Muslims over there are the typical insane Muslims, but the secularists, in a twist not really seen here in the states, are pretty loony, too. Imagine if the ACLU had a bloodthirsty army or the Rev. Barry Lynn went on Hardball packin’ heat. . .
The instigating conflict in “Snow” concerns a group of ultra religious girls who refuse to remove their headscarfs at school. When they are forced to, they commit suicide. But suicide is a sin, so they are rejected by the religion they fought for. And the circular arguements just keep going from there. The setting is the small border city of Kars with its ruins of Armenian, Georgian, Russian and Kurdish culture being pulled in half by the hardline Kemalists from Istambul and Ankara and the insane Muslim fundamentalists with their backers in Iran. In between is a rogue’s gallery of corrupt politicians, journalists, educators and travelling theatrical companies.
I can’t say enough good things about “Snow.” It is a thick book and given, at times, to the occasional plotless sequence, but I really feel like I “got” what this very unique city and situation are like. The hotels and teahouses and theaters are explained with a journalist’s eye even though the protagonist is a poet. And a very poetic poet — one who is likely to throw away lines like “I saw her sitting by the window and I suddenly knew my soul was alone in the galaxy” and jazz like that. At first I thought it was annoying, but after a while you get used to it.
I was carrying this book around with me for close to a month — not because it was slow reading but because I enjoyed it so much I didn’t want it to end. Highly recommended.
