Bookish Déjà-Vu: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

The return to the place of a happy childhood can be quite overwhelming for everybody, notably for a sensitive person who has been away for long. Faded and repressed memories are bound to resurface in the once familiar surroundings, but such a reencounter with the past will inevitably revive emotions, too. Sometimes it may even feel like a time warp with everything that this implies. In my bookish déjà-vu Snow by Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Turkish poet Ka who has been living in political exile in Germany for many years, arrives in the Eastern Anatolian town of his early childhood. He hopes to overcome writer’s block meeting his recently divorced schoolmate İpek on whom he had a crush as a boy, when heavy snowfalls cut off the place and inspire the head of a travelling theatre troupe to seize power in town…

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