Here [in Anatolian Tales] are seven miniature folk-epics from a brutal and elemental society—a sun-smitten plain in Turkey—that offers the perfect milieu for an art like Kemal's, pungent, controlled, harshly coloured, touched sparingly with lyricism or bitterness. It is his society, and he writes perfectly from within it, without overt sympathy or abhorrence. The villagers brutalise one another as hideously as they are brutalised by the local aghas or by the numbing heat that pounds almost audibly through these pages. A well-meaning young Commissioner is defeated by the stratagems of the rice-planters who flood out a village; a widower can find no one to suckle his baby; there are mass rapes, bestiality, stonings, murders. And the few moments of release—a kindly cobbler, an ecstatic encounter with a woman in the reeds, the crisp taste of green onions or the smell of pines—stand out as...