They Burn the Thistles

by Kemal, Yashar; McKibben, Bill; Platon, Margaret E.

• ISBN13: 9781590171851
• ISBN10: 1590171853
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-21
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

Turkey's greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal's books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force. Memedintroduced in Kemal's legendary first novel,Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his booksis one of the few truly mythic Figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. InThey Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal's novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit's end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.

Author Biography

YASHAR KEMAL was born into a Kurdish family in a village in southern Anatolia and saw his father brutally murdered at the age of five. He received his basic education in village schools before working as an agricultural laborer, factory-worker, public letter-writer, and journalist. His first novel, Memed, My Hawk won the Varlik Prize for best novel of the year in 1955. Kemal's numerous other books include The Wind from the Plain trilogy, Salman the Solitary, Seagull, and three other books recounting the expoits of Memed, including, They Burn the Thistles. He lives in Istanbul, as its preeminent man of letters and is a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.