Word: turkishly
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...Turkish literature, little of which has ever penetrated to the U.S., has always been derivative. For hundreds of years, Turkish poets imitated those of Persia; in the 19th and 20th centuries, the model has been France. This lively first novel skillfully blends both traditions with a strong individualistic note of its own and suggests that U.S. readers may have been missing something. Beautifully translated by Edouard Roditi, the book tells the story of young Memed who grows up in a mud-walled village hut in a remote province of Anatolia. Recklessly brave and a deadly marksman, Memed battles his environment...
...village belle on the eve of her marriage to Abdi's nephew. Tracked down in the forest, Memed loses his girl but kills the nephew and escapes to the crags and hidden valleys of the Taurus mountains, where he joins a band of outlaws and finally becomes a Turkish Robin Hood. After a dozen gunfights, in which bursts of Homeric rhetoric alternate with bursts of grenades and guns, Memed at last avenges himself by murdering his goat-bearded enemy, Abdi Agha. Then, like a proper hero, he rides off into the sunrise and is never seen again...
...lived much of his novel. Village-born, of Kurdish descent, Kemal was five years old when his father was murdered by an enemy while kneeling beside his son in the mosque. The experience left Kemal with a stammer, which he cured by chanting the traditional songs of Turkish troubadours. This folk poetry glows in his description of the bleak Anatolian land where, each spring, it seems as if "a green rain has fallen," and by midsummer, the high plateaus are blue with thistles "rippling like the sea." There is also the settled villagers' nostalgia for a happier nomadic past...
...Souls' proudest pursuit is dinner-table conversation; in few other stylized societies, even the cannibalistic, do men so assiduously eat their way to power. On weekends, the talk lures Fellows and former Fellows ("quondams") from all over England for "an intellectual Turkish bath," and sometimes All Souls pays a penalty. In the 1930s, when some of its Fellows were notorious architects of appeasement, "that disastrous dinner table" (as Lord Boothby put it) tarred All Souls with the ignominious brush of Munich. Long since recovered from that cabalistic image. All Souls today is a unique bridge between thought and action...
...STRETCH daily at 3:15, 6:30, 9:45. (Ends tomorrow.) Sunday, Shirley MacLaine parades around in a Turkish towel (on the screen) but it's in ALL IN A NIGHT'S WORK...