Kadare lived in France from 1990 to 2002, returning to Albania only after his international reputation would seem to have...
In his classic study The Singer of Tales (1960), eminent scholar Albert Lord demonstrated strong links between the twin Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey and the tradition of oral storytelling continued even into the 20th century in numerous European and Asian cultures, notably those of the Balkan countries. Prominent among the more modern counterparts of these preliterate “singers” are two of the last and present century’s most fascinating writers. Generations of political strife and cultural upheaval were seen through the amplifying prisms of traditional ballad and folklore in the colorful novels and stories of Bosnia’s Nobel laureate Ivo Andric (1892-1975), in such masterpieces as The Bridge on the Drina, which remains too little read today. A better fate perhaps awaits the living author who most closely resembles Andric: Albania’s controversial dissident author Ismail Kadare (b. 1936), winner of the first (2005) Man Booker International Prize and himself a prominent Nobel candidate.
Throughout a highly productive career, Kadare has displayed a truly cosmopolitan sensibility. After studying in Russia and publishing several volumes of poetry strongly influenced by other European literature, he turned to prose, with a boldly political novel (The General of the Dead Army, 1963) about a retired Fascist general and an Italian priest who scour the Albanian countryside in search of remains of Italian soldiers who had perished there during World War II. Such subjects have always involved risks in a tiny country that was until the early 20th century ruled by Ottoman Turks, and subsequently endured the 30-year dictatorship of brutal Stalinist Enver Hoxha. Recent opinions disagree about Kadare’s relationship to Hoxha. Some commentators argue that the novelist enabled the dictator by praising his strong leadership, while others point to transparent criticisms of totalitarian activities in fictions that are, on their surfaces, more allegorical and elliptical than they are openly confrontational.
Kadare lived in France from 1990 to 2002, returning to Albania only after his international reputation would seem to have made official persecution of him and his work unlikely. His more ambitious novels include Chronicle in Stone (1971), Broken April (1978), The Pyramid (1996)—and the forthcoming first English translation of another masterpiece, The Siege (1970). Set in the early 15th century, it chronicles an Ottoman Turkish army’s attack on a Christian fortress sequestered in the Albanian mountains. In a masterly conceptual stroke, Kadare presents the embattled Christians as a single, unified first-person-plural voice, and individualizes their attackers (an ambitious pasha, a nervous chronicler, an astrologer on whose predictions many lives depend et al.) as an unruly chaotic force foredoomed to failure. It’s an original approach to an old story many times retold; a song sung in an eloquently expressive voice, both agelessly familiar and refreshingly new.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84767-185-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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