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Jul. 19th, 2012 11:49 am
One Upon a Time in Anatolia
I don't know why it's taken me a while to get around to reviewing Memed, my hawk (Nicholas Roditi's English translation of İnce Memed by Yaşar Kemal), but I suspect it has to do with it falling into that category of "Books I Like, But Don't Know Why They're Classics". I mean, I can see why it would be a classic for Turkish: it was apparently one of the first novels written since the "catastrophic success" of the Turkish Language Reform to draw heavily on the vernacular for its vigour. This gives it--at least in Roditi's rendition--a sort of naïve directness the makes it a very quick read (and, therefore, just the antidote I needed to Johnson, which I am still struggling through). I started it near the end of last week and finished it in four or five days, which for me is lightning speed.
It has all the trappings one expects from the Romantic Outlaw plot, but Kemal's goal seems to be the a partial deconstruction of the genre. Memed isn't an antihero, but at every stage Kemal points up the differences between who he is and the legends being spun about him by a hungry and adoring public. He's scrawny and soft-hearted and despite his cunning and compassion he makes some awfully questionable decisions. So beyond what's lost in translation, there's also something lost with the passage of time; I suspect this sort of portrayal was much more revolutionary fifty years ago than it is now.
At times, Memed does come across as too virtuous to be true, but this is tempered by the company he keeps. For instance, when he first joins the band of Deli ("Mad") Durdu, this is presented as his only choice after murdering his beloved's fiancé. But later we learn that there are many other bands operating in the area and that switching allegiances between them is both common and accepted. So why does he stay with him as long as he does? Of course, there are enough other inconsistencies in the narration that it's difficult to tell how much of this characterisation is intentional. One that really stuck in my crawl was the scene where a gang of four armed men stroll into the tent of the Ağa of the Saçıkaralı (an actual nomadic tribe in Turkey, as it turns out) and don't even encounter token resistance. If there's a reason why all the men of the tribe are absent from camp it's not made explicit.
Again, though, it's a credit to Kemal's writing that this cavil only occurred to me later, since at the time I was too horrified by the wanton violation of xenia. My only real complain about Kemal's style is that he has a habit of introducing very salient characters--like the Saçıkaralı Ağa--and then dropping them again. I kept waiting for a climactic second encountre between Memed and the nomads only to find this dealt with in passing in a few terse lines. There are no real surprises about who lives and who dies, and only one of the deaths feels cheap. So why did I still feel a bit unsatisfied by the conclusion of the novel?
It has all the trappings one expects from the Romantic Outlaw plot, but Kemal's goal seems to be the a partial deconstruction of the genre. Memed isn't an antihero, but at every stage Kemal points up the differences between who he is and the legends being spun about him by a hungry and adoring public. He's scrawny and soft-hearted and despite his cunning and compassion he makes some awfully questionable decisions. So beyond what's lost in translation, there's also something lost with the passage of time; I suspect this sort of portrayal was much more revolutionary fifty years ago than it is now.
At times, Memed does come across as too virtuous to be true, but this is tempered by the company he keeps. For instance, when he first joins the band of Deli ("Mad") Durdu, this is presented as his only choice after murdering his beloved's fiancé. But later we learn that there are many other bands operating in the area and that switching allegiances between them is both common and accepted. So why does he stay with him as long as he does? Of course, there are enough other inconsistencies in the narration that it's difficult to tell how much of this characterisation is intentional. One that really stuck in my crawl was the scene where a gang of four armed men stroll into the tent of the Ağa of the Saçıkaralı (an actual nomadic tribe in Turkey, as it turns out) and don't even encounter token resistance. If there's a reason why all the men of the tribe are absent from camp it's not made explicit.
Again, though, it's a credit to Kemal's writing that this cavil only occurred to me later, since at the time I was too horrified by the wanton violation of xenia. My only real complain about Kemal's style is that he has a habit of introducing very salient characters--like the Saçıkaralı Ağa--and then dropping them again. I kept waiting for a climactic second encountre between Memed and the nomads only to find this dealt with in passing in a few terse lines. There are no real surprises about who lives and who dies, and only one of the deaths feels cheap. So why did I still feel a bit unsatisfied by the conclusion of the novel?