[There is a native witness of Turkey] who, in the half-dozen books of his that have been translated, has depicted his country with a close attention to detail and yet with a majestic, almost epic sweep.

Yashar Kemal has been compared to Thomas Hardy and Tolstoy, and has several times been short-listed for the Nobel Prize. This is interesting news, no doubt, but hardly illuminating. The author with whom Kemal feels a special kinship … is William Faulkner. This strange pairing-off becomes less strange once you know how closely the cotton-growing plains of Chukurova in South Anatolia resemble those in Yoknapatawpha County, and how similar are the blood-feuds, rural past-times, barn burnings, old time religion and incidents of local heroism….

[Kemal's] first novel, "Memed, My Hawk" achieved enormous celebrity when it was published in English in 1955. He has written many since, and though they appear regularly in translation, he...