Snowfall

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Jesus Christ, will you look at this place?’ he wheezed. ‘Next thing Poirot himself will appear on the scene.’ He pronounced it Pworrott. He’s hit a dry spell but his muse strikes in Kars and he writes a series of poems, or, we are told, 'they write themselves' through his hands in a trance-like state. But he’s very analytical for a poet – we’re shown a geometric diagram he creates to show the relationships among his poems. He’s also obsessed with examining his level of happiness, deliberately trying to improve his happiness, and we all know where that leads. bunu bir tarafa Oidipus'u, bir tarafa Rüstem ile Sührab'ı koyarak yapıyor. Yani üç günlük bir mesele olmadığını anlatıyor. Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın'da da Türkiye'de kadın olma meselesini görüyoruz. Was he imagining it all? There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren't there, of making a pattern where there wasn't one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless. A police crime-investigation into the murder and mutilation of a priest in Ireland – I wonder what the priest could have been guilty of to warrant such a reaction? It seems that once Ireland emerged from the controlling societal influence of the catholic church, it opened the flood gates for stories that shone the light on so many dark crimes from within the church.

This novel has won a zillion prizes, and has received deafening international acclaim for the way it takes on the "clash of the Islamic fundamentalist East & secular West while retaining the humanity of its characters." I DISAGREE. If you were interested in the whole controversy raised by ban of veil in France a few years ago, then this book too might interest you. It is based on real events in a modern and secular Turkey. Here too there is a ban on wearing head-scarves in universities and like, though this is in a country where the majority of the population is Muslim but rulers are still liberals (or rather ultra-liberals). As a consequence several innocent religious women are deprived of their right to education and, forced to choose between education and religion; they end up committing suicide. What made their misfortune worse is the guilt they must have carried to graves since Koran prohibits suicide. And so, in a way, they must have felt condemned by the very religion they were fighting for.

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We have, as the author tells us, a bunch of stereotypical suspects as if they had been selected to be cast in these roles on the stage. There's the staid old estate owner, filled with war stories and riding to hounds. There's his frail, older, but still beautiful second wife. Two snotty-spoiled almost college-age kids, a boy and a girl, live there too. They were born to the deceased first wife. There's a domineering, grumpy live-in maid/cook. There's a crazy stable boy living in a filthy caravan in the woods.

But priests just didn’t get murdered in this country, and certainly not in places like Ballyglass House. The Catholic Church – the powers that be, in other words – would shoulder its way in and take over. There would be a cover-up, some plausible lie would be peddled to the public. The only question was how deeply the facts could be buried.[...] To me, the book shows that the dangers of ultra-liberalism. Liberals should and must fight for the oppressed - Turgut Bey, a liberal who is also one of the better characters, argues "It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be right". I find Kadife more agreeable who puts on scarf, not for religious reasons but to protest against an unjust law. Here liberals are causing the oppression by forcing their values on unwilling people. I hope I haven’t revealed too much of the salient points of the mystery. I already knew John Banville can write excellent prose, and I found the slower pace of this novel, so rich in atmosphere and subtext, to be appropriate and rewarding. I’m not sure if he wrote any other St. John Strafford books, but if there are, I am interested in reading them.Say you pay 100 dollars for good seats at a show. You're so excited and full of anticipation. You sit down in your seat and hear the familiar strains of the instruments tuning. Banville writes the plot within the social context of religion in Ireland at that time. The Archbishop wants the murder covered up as an accident and makes it clear to Strafford what will happen to his career if he crosses the Archbishop. And Father Tom, the victim, has a sordid past, which was common in Ireland at the time. There is a reform school for wayward teenage boys. Father Tom had “his favorites”, boys who he counselled in private. Make no mistake, Banville wants the reader to know and remember the atrocities of the Church. He also writes of the underlying conflict of the Catholics and the protestants at the time. To me, this is a part mystery part social study of Ireland in the mid 1950’s. Ka is traveling to the city of Kars to write an article about an epidemic of suicides among young Turkish women. As the force of westernization has entered the predominantly Muslim city, these young women have been "freed" to discard their head scarves. Their religious beliefs, however, are such that to bare their heads in public is more than they can bear--they would rather die. While investigating the suicides, Ka meets recently divorced Ipek, and he is instantly enthralled. The ensuing story is as much one of political rebellion as it is love story, complete with executions, betrayals, love found and love lost, and mysteries never quite solved. I practically inhaled Snow over a couple of days’ frenzied reading. Not only did it keep me enthralled, but it is deeply funny and humane at the same time. Banville’s depiction of the Irish countryside and the weather is equally mesmerising, with the titular snow ever-present in the form of a blizzard that grows in intensity as the story unfolds. Yes, there are some of Banville’s beloved Greek allusions, especially the concept of ‘agape’, “the love of God for man and of man for God”.

We’re 1957 in rural Ireland. In the mansion of protestant colonel Osborne, the body of a catholic priest is found in the library. The house friend has been stabbed and gelded. From the start, there’s pressure from the archbishop’s palace to treat the whole thing very discreetly and classify it as an accident (he fell from the stairs) and the details that must not come out, imagine the scandal and the neighbours. I found this book also intriguing because of the subject matter, and was drawn into the story right from the first. What if you were a daughter of a Vicar, in Victorian times----one who had education, but not enough money to make a good match, and with no other possibilities in life but to be a governess. This is where we are set when the book opens, and we see the choices that the protagonist begins to make, as she goes through her life. There are twists and turns, as she meets up with her brother and begins to meet other climbing aficionados, getting drawn into another world of living on the edge. She begins to see life in a different light, and starts to take her choices as a woman in another direction than most young women in this era.This is the middle novel in the series of three Detective Straffords. The first was The Secret Guests, and the third, which I also reviewed, is April in Spain. Part of the story is told from the dead priest's perspective and explains some of the forces that made him, leading to his end.