Snow by Orhan Pamuk

I  had almost decided that this Orhan Pamuk - a Turkish writer, is like most Indian authors writing in English. Out of touch with the reality of the country, never faced any serious difficulties in life and hence writing about first world problems of rich third world people - aka shallow. 

But that is changing , as English is the  first language of the middle class, not only affluent. And we middle class people are anything but shallow.
 
Normally the kind of books I have been reading recently (or trying to read) had just one rasa in them, melancholy. OK, according to ancient Indian traditions, a good literary work must have nava-rasas in them. kaarunya rasa, shringara rasa, veera rasa, hasya rasa , bheebhatsa rasa etc, etc. (ie. kindness, romanace, thrill , comedy etc, etc). I think old Sanskrit plays had all these. They had a Vidushak (comedian) just for the sake of hasya rasa - to make you  laugh  Yes, the books which I liked had only one rasa in them - very very sad- rasa.

But in this book snow, by Orhan Pamuk, you have adventure, romance, passion, plots and revenges and then betrayal, almost everything. And so many events. For a person used to reading books with just one or zero event and whole book running on basis of memories, this was strange.

But then if you look from the shoes of Ka, a political exile who comes to visit his country, who gets caught up in the middle of Islamist fundamentals who want to take over the country and secret service and army who deal with these people in the most ruthless way, who meets his college crush and almost makes her his life partner, who gives vent to his feelings by his poems, whom army suspects to be Islamist, and Islamist suspect to be western agent, too much is happening in his life and he has no control over the events.