Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Orhan Pamuk, the author most recently of the novel

Snow, which is published by Alfred A Knopf.

His books, in the order of composition are the White Castle, the Black Book, The New Life, My Name is Red, and Now Snow. Now, Snow has

been attracting attention as the first political novel by Orhan Pamuk,

but it's also the first political novel I've ever read that has no political point of view.

It has a political circumstance which it shuffles and presents from various perspectives and in a way like the other

books, it's a Rubik's Cube kind of novel. I'd say it was more like the other books than it is

like a political novel. But you say it is political.

It's subject matter political. I agree with you that this book is not written to defend a political idea or to make a moral point about politics or to in fact accuse anyone.

The point is, yes, pay attention clearly to the political circumstances of Turkey.

But as I do this, I have not a, I don't have, but as I do it, I don't have a strong political ideas that I think of a will kill the book essentially because I'm I am not that kind of political person I'm a person who is interested in in politics but who is not a political person, who do not go out,

and I do not define myself as a political person whose energies go out there and try to make political comment.

The subject matter is political, but then it is perhaps, as you said, a typical, my kind of novel.

Now, more than that, the book suggests, in a way, not that time heals all wounds, but the time alters circumstances so that a gesture which once meant an affirmation of a religious

affiliation wearing a headscarf has become a gesture against the state in this novel.

And this has taken time that in a peculiar way, when we read this book, as an American,

...