Memed, My Hawk

By Yashar Kemal
Translated from the Turkish by Edouard Roditi

A tale of high adventure and lyrical celebration, tenderness and violence, generosity and ruthlessness, Memed, My Hawk is the defining achievement of one of the greatest and most beloved of living writers, Yashar Kemal. It is reissued here with a new introduction by the author on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication.

Memed, a high-spirited, kindhearted boy, grows up in a desperately poor mountain village whose inhabitants are kept in virtual slavery by the local landlord. Determined to escape from the life of toil and humiliation to which he has been born, he flees but is caught, tortured, and nearly killed. When at last he does get away, it is to set up as a roving brigand, celebrated in song, who could be a liberator to his people—unless, like the thistles that cover the mountain slopes of his native region, his character has taken an irremediably harsh and unforgiving form.

Reviews

Yashar Kemal is a thousand kilometres tall and can make a story of two stones tender and spellbinding. A master.
— John Berger

Yashar Kemal is one of those writers who is content with the patch of earth allotted by birth. As in the case of Faulkner, Akhmatova, or even Joyce, all the events described circle around the site of an early injury. These writers evoke landscapes containing people who, however lost they may be in their marginal existences, fix their gaze upon the center of the world and take up residence there. [Kemal is driven to] write against the age and to tell those stories that have not been elevated to the status of affairs of state because they deal with people who never sat on high, who did not dominate but rather were themselves dominated.
— Günter Grass

A masterpiece.
— Robert Carver, New Statesman

A remarkable novel, reminiscent of Hardy in its power and scope.
— Queen

Yashar Kemal achieves the Russian quality—an intimacy of detail which makes his etching indelible, more selected, and therefore more obvious than life . . . The book is a small, sharp, moving epic of the Turkish soil.
— Sunday Telegraph

Follows in that tradition of strong, simple novels about the life of the peasantry. It has that insider's feeling for man, the oppressed, labouring animal . . . you might find in Tolstoy, Hardy or Silone. The author never loses his freshness, an ability to pick on details as though seen for the first time.
— Guardian

A beautiful novel in the old, glorious tradition of heroic storytelling.
— Scotsman

Also see:

They Burn the Thistles By Yashar Kemal Translated by Margaret E. Platon Introduction by Bill McKibben The great Turkish writer Yashar Kemal's tales of conflict and adventure set in the Taurus Mountains of southeastern Turkey fuse ancient local traditions of oral storytelling with the social and psychological awareness of the nineteenth-century novel.

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