THE SEA-CROSSED FISHERMAN by Yashar Kemal; translated...

THE SEA-CROSSED FISHERMAN by Yashar Kemal; translated by Thilda Kemal; (Braziller: $16.95). Allegory often has a way of crossing that nebulous border into phantasmagory. Yashar Kemal, Turkey’s master storyteller, skirts both sides of the line, moving imperceptibly from one realm to the other. Selim, the fisherman, a continuing mystery to his neighbors, pursues the big catch that will permit him to build his dream house and recapture his long-lost love. His life afloat also affords him release from the sordid environment ashore as he touches nature’s purity by conversing with dolphins. In contrast, Zeynel Celik, abused street waif turned notorious gangster, rampages through the Istanbul demimonde terrifying his former tormentors with fears of bloody revenge as he fuels the popular imagination. Together Selim and Zeynel perform a danse macabre, their destinies linked from the novel’s opening violent paragraphs. Kemal weaves a marvelous tapestry, silken threads among coursest homespun, the venal and magnanimous inextricably intertwined. He writes of men in the fishing village who embroider reality in conversations laced with personal dreams and demons and of daily newspapers that print their own reality amid the swirl of modern Turkish life. He juxtaposes dreams of a Golden Age fueled by love with the petty passions of everyday life powered by greed, revenge and especially fear. These universal themes are seen through the filter of an Anatolian existence--rough, desperate and very human. Throughout the narrative, marred occasionally by awkward translations of dialogue, Kemal deftly unearths our own hopes and fears. And as the horrors of Istanbul’s street life and corrupt politics are paraded before us, we wonder, along with the narrator “. . . whether our true life is not in our dreamland. . . .”