Orhan Pamuk -- Snow, done

It took me a long time to push my way through this novel. Pamuk is at times a little too enamored of doing everything through dialog. But at the end of the day, this is a special book, and I will read more of the guy.

At times, the dense interactions of the love interests of the disparate characters Ka, Ipek, Blue, Kadife, Fazil, Necip, etc., could only remind the attentive reader of my dissertation. And, indeed, Turgunev is invoked at the beginning and the end. Dostoevskii is almost more present, particularly Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic Dostoevskii in which all the characters has full-fledged visions which fight with the narrator. But, in the end, none of Pamuk's characters' visions really cohere for long, they just chrystallize, pass downwards, and melt elegantly away in the rearview.