They Burn the Thistles

By Yashar Kemal
Translated by Margaret E. Platon
Introduction by Bill McKibben

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.

Memed—introduced in Kemal's legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is 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. In They 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.

Read an excerpt (PDF)

Reviews

[The book] has that insider's feeling for man, the oppressed, labouring animal, that you might find in Tolstoy, Hardy, or Silone.
— The Guardian

There are a lot of facts and folklore in the story along with delightful fantasy, all told with an intimacy of detail that makes for fine reading.
— Los Angeles Times

Yashar Kemal...specializes in proletarian fiction—novels and short stories that bristle with passion and political commitment...Kemal has become Turkey's first world-class novelist...They Burn the Thistles is thus a valuable addition to the body of literature for society's sake.
— The Washington Post

The sequence of events in the novel could not be more exciting...It is like a myth, but the mythic quality is given concreteness in the distinct personalities of the villagers...This novel is a worthy successor to Memed, My Hawk...and I doubt that anyone who reads They Burn the Thistles will hesitate in...concluding that Kemal is an important literary figure.
— Paul Theroux, The New York Times

...One of the modern world's great storytellers. To read him is to be reminded that life itself is a story. He writes fearlessly, like a hero.
— John Berger

Also see:

Memed, My Hawk By Yashar Kemal Translated from the Turkish by Edouard Roditi Tenderness and violence, generosity and ruthlessness explode unpredictably in a tale of high adventure that is also a profoundly considered response to a troubled world.

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