Yashar Kemal's novels, set in the backward villages of his native Taurus Mountains, have an abundance of … exotic verisimilitude. Perhaps there are other reasons for his wide popularity in Turkey …, but for American readers the fascination of his novels lies largely in his depiction of a way of life as utterly alien to us as life on Mars. (p. 14)

Yashar Kemal has been compared with Tolstoy, a burden no one deserves to bear, and has been praised for the epic quality of his novels. I don't know about "epic"—among reviewers it seems to mean something like "a tale of simplified passions set among primitives," which leaves any genuine epic out in the cold—but Mr. Kemal, who grew up in a village much like Yalak, gives a much more astringent picture of peasant life than the aristocratic Tolstoy. His villagers possess neither earthy wisdom nor natural piety...