Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk is a brilliant writer. I read one of his classic novels, Snow, on my way home from Turkey. It’s a love story weaved around political intrigue, murder, religious tensions, and a melancholy that only Pamuk seems to capture.

The melancholy is the only thing that drags on this book. If you read the book you could conclude that Turkish citizens, and intellectuals in particular, see themselves as living in a failed system that cannot quite seem to grasp modernity. That storyline gets tiresome after a while and you want to just shout “take some prozac and get over it, dude!”

The tension between secular and religious is intensely personal throughout the book. The challenges of being the bridge between East and West makes Turkey an intersection of competing ideas, and Pamuk captures this perfectly. Which is what leads to the melancholy — it’s clear that Pamuk is himself struggling with Turkey’s role in the world.

Before visiting Istanbul I read Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City. Just like Snow, it is filled with beautifully written descriptions that are filled with melancholy and longing. But Snow is by far the better story and more interesting read.

I liked Snow but find it hard to recommend to others. It has an intensity, like a great Russian novel, that you may find compelling. But that same intensity can be difficult to slog through if it doesn’t capture your heart. For me it was a blend of both.