Great world literature or a Turkish potboiler? : They Burn the Thistles

Ludicrous first chapter aside, Yashar Kemal's "They Burn the Thistles," Turkish novel from 1969 now thankfully republished by the diligent NYBR press, gets going prtty quickly as a good story about an evil landowner, Ali Safran (?) Bey, who controls a group of villages in some remote part of Turkey at some indeterminate time in history - 20th century? I can't even tell - and pretty much bullies everyone and the legendary warrior Slim Mehmet (the Hawk) who returns secretly to the village, is sheltered by his elderly Uncle Osman, and who will inevitably take on the evil Bey. Early part of the novel tells of Bey's love for his Arabian thoroughbred and how he is tricked into exchanging the horse with one of the villagers and how he exacts brutal revenge (and the horse escapes - another chapter without any human follows the horse galloping across the plains, very odd). Once you get past the exotic (to me) nature of the names and locales, the story is quite easy to read and well-paced - and I have to wonder, is it too simplistic? It's really on some level not much more than a comic-book - the characters are types without complexity of feeling or motive, all evil or all good, the confrontations are drawn in the broadest of brushstrokes - so is Kemal really Turkey's greatest novelist, as the jacket blurb suggests (I doubt that, not since Snow), or is this book more or less at the level of a Leon Uris or Herman Wouk, best-selling page-turner that seems more profound to American readers because it's from and of a different culture? Translate the people and events into an American setting and picture how well they would stand up - OK as entertainment, pretty thin as literature.