Kemal’s memoir describes the life of his family in eastern Anatolia, by the Lake Van, and how the family was driven westwards by the Russians in WW1.
You read of gangs of children, orphaned through the war, who are hunted down and killed; of the fantastic wide, wide landscape; of storytellers wandering from village to village; of an orphan whom the family rescues and who much, much later kills Kemal’s father in a mosque, right next to Kemal; of his beginnings as a writer, living in a card-board-box in an Istanbul park, eating the fish that he caught in the Bosporus.
In German the book is called “Der Baum des Narren”, literally “The fool’s tree”.
Yes, in a sense he is a naive and un-intellectual writer. His writing is very much focused on the plot.
I wouldn’t pit Pamuk and Kemal against eachother, just like I wouldn’t pit, say, Brahms and Wagner, against eachother (or to make the comparison seem less German: Hemingway vs. Thomas Wolfe).
They are both strong artists in their own right.
Yes, I have been to Anatolia. I cycled from Istanbul to Dogubeyazit, on the Iranian border.
It was very, very memorable.
The people are extremely hospitable. The roads are well paved and empty. In the mornings, the muezzin awakes you (actually the “click” of the loudspeaker awakes you when the muezzin turns it on).
The land is sparsely populated and undulates in huge waves. When you reach the top of a hill you have a wide view over the yellow steppe.
There are volcanoes and ancient cities that have been dug underground.
And so on and so forth.