One of the most ludicrous first chapters ever written

Started Yashar Kemal's "The Burn the Thistles" last night and have to say the first chapter was so ludicrous I thought maybe it was a put-on. Many books (including mine) start with a paragraph or a passage that establishes a mood or a setting or a theme that is important to understanding and appreciating the work as it unfolds but is not essential to the plot or the characters, a bit of an introductory note or an overture, but in Thistles we get an entire fairly long chapter that describes the landscape and topography of, apparently, a Turkish (Kurdish?) mountainous region, dozens and dozens of place names, not one familiar (to Western readers anyway - and maybe they're fictitious), not a single human character - it's like a Hardy novel gone crazy. I thought, I'll never finish this book, I'll never even start it - and that said it's all the more surprising that in the 2nd chapter Thistles becomes far more conventional and engaging, as we begin with one of the familiar novelistic tropes - a stranger comes to town - we see a man on a night journey through the wilderness described in chapter 1 and he's on his way to a small town, in disguise - and when he arrives we learn he is not a stranger but a returning prodigal, a legendary fighter who will stay hidden in his uncle's home, and we learn that he will in some way confront the evil landlord/tyrant who has taken over the life of the village, so we're set for a classic confrontation and we'll see how it develops over some 400 pages. A Turkish novel, from I think the 60s, another in the many (mostly) European works destined for obscurity but reissued by the NYRB press (and mostly, sadly, remaindered).