SALMAN THE SOLITARY

by Yashar Kemal ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 1998

A 1980 novel by the Turkish author (Sea-Crossed Fisherman, 1985, etc.) renowned for his colorful dramatizations of his country's endangered traditions and folkways. It's a story of familial--and, by implication, ethnic--conflict, set in the Anatolian mountains, about one Ismail Agha, a wealthy Kurd whose adopted Armenian son grows to become a threat to his less militaristic (and weaker) natural son Mustafa. The tensions between Salman and Mustafa are blatantly overdrawn, but in the interpolated tale of Halib, a poor mountain villager mercilessly abused by a cruel landlord, Kemal contrives a lean and powerful story of vengeance that, while scorning to digress or preach (this writer's glaring weakness), vibrates with the swiftness and resonance of myth.

Pub Date: March 31, 1998

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 314

Publisher: "Harvill--dist. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux"

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998

Categories: FICTION