The translation of Yashar Kemal's Anatolian Tales is in perfect keeping with one's stereotype idea of Eastern languages; the English in these three long and four short Turkish stories seems as timeless as the language of The Arabian Nights…. But for all the romantic associations the prose style may conjure up in the English reader, the stories are savage, far crueller than the emotional cruelty dreamed up by avante-garde western writers, for Kemal deals with the oppressed, the poor, and the frightened who are oppressed, poor and frightened in a very real physical sense; there is no shade of Franz Kafka peering out of the closet in these tales. Yet Kemal, for all his being the unblinking terrible Turk, is a writer with a great heart, and the passionate talent to show the human spirit enduring. In every story he captures at once the quality of life in...