Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ now out in Greek
The Greek market has high expectations for the book by Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk that has just been released in a Greek translation. «Snow» is a novel with political resonance as well as the contemplative element that is typical of Pamuk’s writing. The novel has already won the Medicis Prize in France as well as acclaim from the international press. Pamuk’s work is popular with Greek readers, and Oceanida, which has published all his titles up to and including «Snow,» is issuing an edition of 10,000 copies, which is an impressive number for a novel by a foreign writer. Translated by Stella Vrettou, a seasoned translator of Pamuk, «Snow» is expected to do well. Large bookshops (Eleftheroudakis, Ianos, Papasotiriou and Fnac) have already ordered 200-250 copies apiece. Using the snow that covers the city of Kars in remotest Anatolia as a potent symbol, Pamuk weaves a contemporary myth of political ideas. The hero is a poet, a political exile in Germany. When he returns to Turkey in the early 1990s, he goes to Kars, an area between the spheres of influence of two empires, the Ottoman and the Russian. He comes back as a journalist to investigate a series of worrying events in an isolated community that is used to seeing internal clashes covered up by the velvety silence of the snow. «The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would call the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.» So Pamuk leads his readers into the world of his novel.
