Cheap Undying Grass (Book) (Yashar Kemal) Price

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Customer Reviews of Undying Grass

The unending story
I readily confess that I've only read this, the third volume of a 3 part series. So, of course, I might have missed a lot of the nuances I could have picked up if I'd read things in order. However, it is the author's responsibility to make each book understandable in itself, not dependent on prior volumes. But don't anticipate my comments---I am not going to say that this novel is incomprehensible. THE UNDYING GRASS is a part of Yashar Kemal's giant body of work and in it we see many of the same elements at work: sympathetic treatment of Turkey's working people, depiction of feudal injustice, the tragic results of ignorance, man's struggle with nature, and the natural world of the Chukurova, that semi-legendary (as presented in Kemal's work) area in southern Anatolia where most of his stories take place. The time, as usual, is a little vague. In the background are American jet planes taking off from Incirlik airbase, Mercedes Benz', mention of Red China and even Fidel Castro---so it has to be the 1960s--- but nothing whatsoever of the modern world penetrates the lives of our characters, who seem stuck in the early Ataturk era.

What I will say is that every author has a bad day, maybe makes an unfortunate collection of choices. Perhaps this novel represents one of those times. It is too long, it is too slow. I felt that having developed these characters over two previous novels, Kemal did not want to drop them, but did not know what to do with them. Their thoughts, feelings, and actions are repeated over and over. Memedik wants to kill the Muhtar, but how many shadows does he fear, how many slashes of his willow knife in the air do we see ? Old Meryemdje survives in the village by herself, wishing for company, plotting to catch a rooster while Omer the orphan has been sent to kill her for reasons the reader of this third volume cannot readily understand. Long Ali regrets leaving his mother back in the mountain village---he regrets and regrets and regrets, but does nothing. Tashbash, the martyr-saint, very Christ-like, it seemed to me, goes up and down in villagers' estimation like a yo-yo. Points are not only made, they are hammered home. Everything is drawn out; steel green flies gather countless times, the saint is beaten and then revered and then beaten again, clouds of mosquitoes plague the cotton-picking villagers in the endless plain again and again, eagles (hope or fate or the possibility of redemption) soar overhead in almost every chapter. No, I'm sorry. Kemal has written some excellent novels and I've reviewed them too. This one should have been cut by a lot. It isn't one of his best.

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Truly Wonderful
A fitting and devastating finale to his trilogy. Kemal explores in "The Wind from the Plain" series the goodness, evil, and drive for self-destruction that is immanent in all humanity. In his analysis and hilarious tales of man's constant need for deification and iconoclasm, Kemal has shown that if anyone deserves to be one of the greatest writers from Turkey and the Middle East, he is the one.