Snow

I prefer Prishtina in the snow. For once, neither dusty nor muddy, even the stink of the nearby power stations seems somehow to have been smothered. Snow makes all cities look a little alike, from the most beautiful to the most ugly. Or perhaps I'm trying much too hard to be positive about Prishtina.

I just finished reading Orhan Pamuk's "Snow". Another apparently ugly city that took on a new aspect when all white. It was a huge struggle, dreadfully dull. I forced myself to read to the end, mainly so I could say with conviction that it was awful. So slow-moving, such uninteresting characters. It was all completely unconvincing. Maybe Pamuk is as introverted as almost all his characters, analysing every thought, every action in endless detail. But most people are not so utterly tiresome. How did Ka manage to talk to so many people, sit in so many tea shops, walk so many streets, have so many clandestine meetings, get arrested and tortured, make passionate love so many times in such a short period, and still manage to fill several notebooks with every detail of everything he did? And why would he want to record every little boring detail?

My expectations of Pamuk were high, and I was dreadfully disappointed. Are any of his other books any better?