Snow by Orhan Pamuk

It has been a week since I bought the book but somehow I haven't been able to come up and read it yet. I book is called 'Snow' by Orhan Pamuk. Christopher Hitchins, tells us why does 'Snow' give us important insights into Turkey, which might be our idea of a modern Muslim nation, there is much which doesn't meet the eye.

When frozen in the present, the mise-en-scène discloses a community of miserably underemployed people, caught among a ramshackle state machine, a nascent Islamism, and the claims of competing nationalist minorities. A troupe of quasi-Brechtian traveling players is in town, and it enacts a "play within a play," in which the bitter violence of the region is translated with shocking effect directly onto the stage. Drawn into the social and religious conflict, Ka seems to alternate between visions of "snow" in its macrocosmic form—the chilly and hostile masses—and its microcosmic: the individual beauty and uniqueness of each flake. Along the scrutinized axes that every flake manifests he rediscovers his vocation and inspiration as a poet and arranges a cycle of verses. This collection is lost when, on his return to Frankfurt, he is shot down in a street of the red-light district.