The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yaşar Kemal

Book Overview

A violent chance encounter in a small Turkish fishing village results in a murder, for which Fisherman Selim is unfairly blamed. This tale of violence and obsession has been written by one of Turkey's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807611220
• ISBN13: 9780807611227
• Release Date: August 1985
• Publisher: George Braziller
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Kid Killer Meets Mythic Man in Marmara

Zeynel kicks open the café door and murders Ihsan in the first paragraph of Kemal's novel. Fisher Selim forces him to drop the gun and spits in his face, but doesn't turn him in. The contrast between these two is set up, then, on the very first page and lasts throughout the book. Zeynel becomes a wanted fugitive, fleeing endlessly around Istanbul, trying to stay one step ahead of the cops. The newspapers blow him up into Turkey's most wanted criminal, turn him into an all-powerful monster, lay each latest crime at his door. Selim dreams, fishes, mourns lost loves for both woman and dolphin, mostly does little, but helps his fellow man. In this book, Kemal is not so much a writer as a mythmaker. If THE SEA-CROSSED SAILOR is not mythology, I'll eat my hat. It's modern mythology, though, with the forces of good being those who fight against rapacious capitalism and for the environment---for those who love dolphins, justice, and gardens, against those former drug and gun runners who knock down beautiful old houses and trees and put up nine story blocks of flats,. How many times does the sun stop at the horizon, rose-purple, rose-purple clouds floating about it, staining the water purple,while airplanes glided like golden bullets through the sun, flashing rose-purple in and out of the clouds ? Fisher Selim is a strong, wise hero who confronts evil in several forms, overcomes it, and is transformed. Kemal's writing is color, images piled on top of each other like eggplants, carrots, peppers, leeks, and cauliflowers in the Istanbul bazaar. The novel is packed chock-full of emotion---violence, sex, love, hate, anger, friendship, loyalty--- action, whether running from the cops or fishing or shooting down the guilty and innocent---dreams and visions. You will not find the placid ponds of suburbia here. Yashar Kemal may not be the philosopher that Orhan Pamuk is, but his Istanbul is far more lively than Pamuk's. It is not a middle-class, intellectual Istanbul in a dark suit. It is a city riven between super-rich and dirt-poor. It is the smell of rotten garbage floating in the Golden Horn and it is grilled fish dripping out of a hunk of bread onto your pants. The author's sympathy is always with the poor, the millions who toil and live in the jerry-built slums, whose homes are often knocked down by the city. Sait Faik, in his collection of stories "Dot on the Map" produced pale efforts in the same direction, in the same landscape, but Kemal's novel is the "complete submarine sandwich"-juicy, full of interesting bits, and extremely satisfying. Like the Brazilian author, Jorge Amado, Kemal brings a whole world alive in his novels, a world not much known to outsiders.