Review of Snow by Orhan Pamuk

A very moving, poetic, dense book which explains much I did not know about contemporary Turkey. If only British writers could write interestingly about modern Britain (one thinks of people like David Hare and Carol Churchill etc whose critique of England is a two dimensional caricature). I wonder if Pamuk has read Joseph Conrad; Pamuk's narrative shifts and treatment of idealists remind me of Conrad occasionally. The dead Armenians and the suppressed Kurds colour the background of this story which a makes me want to visit Kars probably en route to Armenia. A very beautiful novel and intensely topical in its description of the crisis in Islam and the world crisis caused by Islam.