‘The silence of snow thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver,’ starts Orhan Pamuk’s novel, aptly named, ‘Snow’. ‘If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.’ It’s a natural scene setter – evoking a sky’s greyness, the soft crunch of footsteps, and the particular stillness that snow brings as it falls across the land.
This issue of Brownbook is an ode to such snowy landscapes. The Middle East’s lesser-known sibling of sea and sand.