kar (kitap)

• kitapçılara kar yağdıracak olan orhan pamuk'un yeni kitabının adı.
• çıkar çıkmaz korsana düşen^* kitap...bu işi yapan kişilerin kitabın üzerine hologram bile basmış olmaları bile başlı başına bir olay...
• başkahramanı olan şair ka'nın kars sokaklarında yağan karın altında şehri keşfetmeye uğraştığı orhan pamuk'un son romanı.
• (bkz: ka kar kars)
• bu romanda pamuk kendine pek yabanci bir konuyu kendisinin uzman oldugu bir alana cekerek zekice isin icinden siyrilmis.
  turkiye'ye yabancilasmis, batiya yuzunu donmus aydinin turkiye'nin sosyal sorunlarina bir goz atmasi ne derece saglikli olabilir diye de sorgulanabilir. bu acidan roman baslarken inandiriciligini yitiriyor gibi gozukse de pamuk zekice bir eldiven giydiriyor romana. anlaticiya karakter verip, ki onu kahramanin arkadasi haline getirip, dostoyevski'nin eski bir teknigini uyguluyor. boylece kendisinin cok yakindan bildigi bati-dogu celiskilerinin icinde kavrulan aydin tipinin sozculugunu yaptirdigi anlaticinin da yardimi ile olaylara iki acidan bakabilmistir.
• sonlarına dogru heyecanlandıran orhan pamuk kitabı. diger romanlarının sıktıgı veya karı$ık oldugu soyleminin aksine bu kitabı zevkle okunacak, surukleyecek tarzda. bence bir $ekilde uzuyor insanı okuyup bitirince.
• orhan pamuk'un, "benim adim kirmizi'dan sonra nasil kitap yazilir ki?" temali endişelerimizi silen; beklenmedik derece sürükleyici; aşktan, siyasetten, kardan ve hayattan bahseden romani... ilginç olarak, kitapta orhan ve ipek'in konuştuğu yerin adi "yeni hayat pastahanesi"dir... yeni hayat bir nedir? eveeet, bravo...
• orhan pamuk'un bu kitabı çıktığında yeni şafak gazetesinden bir köşeyazarı^* kitabın reklamıyla ilgili yapılanlar karşısında :
  
  '' kar'ın kitapcı vitrinlerini süslediği günlerde, ajanslar italya'da 'en iyi yabancı yazar ödülü'nün orhan pamuk'a verildiği haberini geçtiler. bence türkiye'de de en iyi yabancı yazar ödülü orhan pamuk'a verilmeli ve son romanının ismi 'kâr' olarak değiştirilmeli''
  
  şeklinde bir yazıyla kitabı eleştirmiştir...
• "bendeki eksikliğin bazen yalnızca sen değil; bütün bir dünya olduğunu düşünüyorum." cümlesi hala - yıllar sonra hala - aklımdan çıkmamış şimdiye dek okuduğum en orhan pamuk romanı.
• new york times'daki kar elestirisi asagidaki gibi:
  
  in his last novel, "my name is red," the great and almost irresistibly beguiling turkish novelist orhan pamuk devised a breathtaking image for the schism in his country's soul between westernization and the traditional values of islam.
  
  set in the 16th century, "red" presents the schism as the incursion of renaissance painting - representational, three-dimensional and with an individualist vision - into the sultan's court. there the flat, stylized and impersonal grace of the traditional miniaturists is upheld as a matter of religion; and western perspective is abhorred, since, for instance, it could make a nearby dog bigger than a far-off mosque.
  
  the implications go way beyond art. in mr. pamuk's pyrotechnics of mystery, murders, eroticism and glittering colors, art is war and civil war among humanity's embattled religious and historical values.
  
  "snow," translated from turkish by maureen freely, deals with the same schism but its setting is political. it is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor and more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author's same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost. all this finds voices through characters whose tactile immediacy fades imperceptibly into a fog of ambiguousness and contradiction.
  
  often we don't know where we are, only to realize that this is exactly where we are: in mr. pamuk's vision of a turkey unable to know itself. the fight has gone on too long and run too deep: a schism not of two distinct sides but of two sides existing within a single consciousness, one that is both the nation's and the author's. educated abroad, trained in western literature and culture, he is caught in the entwined roots of tradition and modernity, each choking the other.
  
  culturally and politically mr. pamuk is a westerner, but he is shattered to see his beliefs embodied in the methods used by the heirs of kemal ataturk who, grown dictatorial and often corrupt, have tried to force their secular code upon a vast islam-bred rural and urban underclass (no turbans, fezzes or head scarves). in an epigraph he quotes dostoyevsky's sardonic rendering of russia's own modernizers: "well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. because the european enlightenment is more important than people."
  
  ka, the protagonist of "snow," could not bear the consequences if the popular will turned out to be fundamentalist. he is not so much the author's alter ego as his emissary to the wilder, zanier shores of a dilemma that by now is more than his own and turkey's. it shows itself these days in a number of countries, including the one where the united states has engaged itself so chaotically. trying to democratize, that is, yet most likely unwilling to accept the likely failure that would follow an unlikely success.
  
  a blocked poet and onetime radical, ka returns from germany after 12 years' exile to get back in touch with his country. a newspaper assignment takes him to a town near the georgian border to investigate a rumor, mostly exaggerated, about a wave of schoolgirls who killed themselves when ordered to remove their head scarves.
  
  in his picaresque wanderings through the streets, symbolically blurred and isolated under a weeklong blizzard, he goes from one encounter to the next. some are sinister, some alluring, some surreal. a dog, a charcoal-colored match for the german overcoat ka proudly wears, persists in following him around as if to mock his westernizing vanity. each meeting is a dissonance, a clue to a puzzle he can't make out.
  
  he finds a vicious paramilitary killer who claims to be upholding ka's own civilized values against the prospect of a turkish iran. there is an old communist who tolerates a daughter's head scarf as a rebellion against the establishment, and a newspaper editor who publishes as past events those that are still to take place. and - partly a magical-realist touch and partly an acid satire on the press - publication seems to make them take place.
  
  ka is moved to anguish by necip, a young fundamentalist of surpassing sweetness who is afraid he will lose his faith (though he's killed before he can). he is chilled and infuriated by blue, a lethal yet childlike underground activist.
  
  most extravagantly, and it is the novel's garish, extended climax, he becomes involved with sunay, a theater impresario and former leftist who now seems to work on behalf of the military ultras pledged to the secular ataturk tradition. sunay organizes a crude anti-islamic vaudeville that incites a near-riot. this provides the excuse for the local army garrison to mount a minicoup and arrest, torture or kill islamists and kurds. controlling it all, the impresario glories in having achieved a supreme work of art, one whose dramatic culmination will be his own death onstage.
  
  art, its vanities and its detachment from consequences, is one of the author's targets. but what marks mr. pamuk and his targets is that he stands alongside them to receive his own lethal arrows. and he does it with odd gaiety and compassion.
  
  ka wanders through the town's murderous chaos receiving tidy inspiration and producing 19 poems of exactly 36 lines each. he is a fool of time, but his creator is tender and funny with his fools. ka is doomed finally to betray, and so is the marvelous woman he has a besotted and arousingly depicted affair with; each in a different way is an innocent.
  
  even the symbols get affectionate treatment. cutting off the town, the blizzard may stand for the isolation from any universal truth or value; one that history seemingly requires by history while it conducts its contorted affairs. the snow, though, is of surpassing beauty and hauntingly rendered. for mr. pamuk beauty does not redeem the tragic horrors begotten by human passions and obstinate memory. neither do the horrors diminish it.