“Back in 2004,” Literary Hub writes, “three literary heavyweights reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s novel of Modern Turkey,” and in the article “Atwood, Updike and Hitchens on Snow“ the site compiles remarks from three individual book reviews.
In a review published in the August 30, 2004 New Yorker, Updike concluded, “If at times Snow seems attenuated and opaque, we should not forget that in Turkey, insofar as it partakes of the Islamic world’s present murderous war of censorious fanaticism versus free speech and truth-seeking, to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage. Pamuk, relatively young as he is, at the age of fifty-two, qualifies as that country’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the near-assassination of Islam’s last winner must cross his mind. To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused and, against the grain of the author’s usual antiquarian bent, entirely contemporary in its setting and subjects, took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners.”