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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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