“If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow”, muses Ka, the protagonist of “Snow”. The novel of last year’s literary Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk is set  in Eastern Anatolia, in Kars, to be precise, quite a bit to the south actually from where our bus now struggles uphill into the Kackar mountains. Yet the snow in this most precipitous part of Turkey is the same all the way: large flakes “swirling out of the sky like feathers”, as Pamuk puts it. They were falling ceaselessly outside our bus windows “as slowly and silently as snow in a dream”… Continue Reading