Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Set in eastern Turkey, the protagonist (a Turk who had lived several years in political exile in Germany) visits a remote town to allegedly investigate a rash of suicides by girls forced to not cover their heads as a religious gesture. But really, he's there to pursue his one true chance at love and to find himself.

The focus of the book soon moves beyond the scarf suicide girls to a culmination of events involving Islamist extremists, Kurdish nationalists, military/police/secret service, and a coup led by a visiting theatre troupe. For the few days the town is cut off from the rest of the world due to a raging blizzard, rules of reality change. I learned that those rumors about Turkish prisons aren't really exaggerated, and to better understand extremism and nationalism, Turkish culture in general - particular the tension between the secular and the religious, and the inanity of love.

All that said, and yes I did learn from it, "Snow" is a great title because reading this book was very much like slogging through a very deep snow. Not a book I read to finish out of delight and interest, but something to get through to get the damn thing done. Take all the worst aspects of some of my favorite writers - Kundera, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Peter Hoeg, Italo Calvino - and mishmash them together in a blizzard - that's what we have here.

The book cover notes include one critic's comment "Hilarious." There wasn't anything hilarious in it. There was some weirdness, but nothing at all funny. And suggestions of Nobel Prize? Yawnsky. It's not "thrilling" if you don't give a damn about any of the characters after he kills off the one sympathetic one. I have a hunch that the timeliness of the theme (particularly religious fundamentalism) causes this outpouring of positive reviews rather than literary merits on its own.