Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Successor by Ismail Kadare The Successor by Ismail Kadare. In The Successor Ismail Kadare mines his country's recent history and puts an infamous death into a crucible. In this way, Kadare captures the strangeness of what was Albania's perverse version of an elite community, those close enough to power to be direct psychological captives of its quixotic and ruthless ruler. The Guide, a literary stand in for Enver Hoxha, Albania's community dictator, is the captor here: his appearances and absences, his cryptic utterances, and most frightening, his silences, all fuel the vital obsession among his inner circle-interpreting favor or disfavor. This novel is a riff on the mysterious death of Hoxha's designated successor, Mehmet Shehu, a mystery that gripped Albania when he was found shot at his home in Tirana in 1981. Even belief that his death was suicide didn't indicate lack of suspicion, as many believed that it must have been forced in some way. In the novel, the death heightens the obsession with the dictator's thoughts, but Kadare flattens his characters by giving them no other occupation than Guide reading. Save a few brief pages about the Successor's daughter, whose engagement and wedding are seen as the provocation for the death, and a tantalizing flash of the length an artist will go to for the sake of art, there is scarcely any emotion other than fear. Even in the worst of times, people love and play and philosophize and dream. Kadare interprets the novel as shellac, freezing his characters in essentially one thought, one moment, one emotion. In this third-generation translation (the book was translated by David Bellos from Tedi Papavrami's French translation of the Albanian), Kadare's writing style is very direct, not quite sparse, but detached and impersonal, akin to an institutional report. It's hard even to believe in the wails, coming as they do in the midst of lean prose and erupting in slightly bizarre fashion: "Wake up, my daughter, they've come to evict us. Get up, unhappy daughter!" The Successor's wife cries to her daughter. It doesn't sound quite like any mother I've ever heard. Like most native Americans, I have no experience of institutionalized national fear, yet we know from the diaries that survive those worlds that there are more to oppressed people's lives than the world dictated by the oppressor. If not, there would be no overthrow, there would be no dissidents, there would be no social movements. Writing is often what gives voice to that spirit when all around has been silenced. The Successor is not in this tradition. It may be that Kadare has woven it in this fashion to give readers the experience of the groundhog-like nature of any emotion other than fear. In that way the novel works as a set piece and, undoubtedly, it is an important cultural artifact. Kadare is Albania's most famous living novelist, and his novel succeeds-but only on one level. The Successor by Ismail Kadare. In The Successor Ismail Kadare mines his country's recent history and puts an infamous death into a crucible. In this way, Kadare captures the strangeness of what was Albania's perverse version of an elite community, those close enough to power to be direct psychological captives of its quixotic and ruthless ruler. The Guide, a literary stand in for Enver Hoxha, Albania's community dictator, is the captor here: his appearances and absences, his cryptic utterances, and most frightening, his silences, all fuel the vital obsession among his inner circle-interpreting favor or disfavor. This novel is a riff on the mysterious death of Hoxha's designated successor, Mehmet Shehu, a mystery that gripped Albania when he was found shot at his home in Tirana in 1981. Even belief that his death was suicide didn't indicate lack of suspicion, as many believed that it must have been forced in some way. In the novel, the death heightens the obsession with the dictator's thoughts, but Kadare flattens his characters by giving them no other occupation than Guide reading. Save a few brief pages about the Successor's daughter, whose engagement and wedding are seen as the provocation for the death, and a tantalizing flash of the length an artist will go to for the sake of art, there is scarcely any emotion other than fear. Even in the worst of times, people love and play and philosophize and dream. Kadare interprets the novel as shellac, freezing his characters in essentially one thought, one moment, one emotion. In this third-generation translation (the book was translated by David Bellos from Tedi Papavrami's French translation of the Albanian), Kadare's writing style is very direct, not quite sparse, but detached and impersonal, akin to an institutional report. It's hard even to believe in the wails, coming as they do in the midst of lean prose and erupting in slightly bizarre fashion: "Wake up, my daughter, they've come to evict us. Get up, unhappy daughter!" The Successor's wife cries to her daughter. It doesn't sound quite like any mother I've ever heard. Like most native Americans, I have no experience of institutionalized national fear, yet we know from the diaries that survive those worlds that there are more to oppressed people's lives than the world dictated by the oppressor. If not, there would be no overthrow, there would be no dissidents, there would be no social movements. Writing is often what gives voice to that spirit when all around has been silenced. The Successor is not in this tradition. It may be that Kadare has woven it in this fashion to give readers the experience of the groundhog-like nature of any emotion other than fear. In that way the novel works as a set piece and, undoubtedly, it is an important cultural artifact. Kadare is Albania's most famous living novelist, and his novel succeeds-but only on one level. Tyranny in Tirana. Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European races, the Illyrians. For many in the West, though, Albania remains as remote as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The country came into existence only in 1912 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, the fantastically named King Zog, was ousted by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Five years later, Mussolini's troops were expelled in turn by Albanian nationalist Enver Hoxha. Following 50 years of communism under Hoxha, the Balkan nation is now a fledgling democracy. However, it will be many years before Albania shakes off Hoxha's brutal legacy. Outwardly a Stalinist, Hoxha was an Ottoman dandy whose politburo was united less by Marxist-Leninism than by the Balkan revenge cult of gjak per gjak (blood for blood). For 40 years, Hoxha terrorised Albania by retaliatory murders and government purges. His dictatorship was inimical to literary expression, yet Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has produced marvellously subtle critiques of Hoxha even under his censorship. Kadare was never a party member, but he was chairman of a cultural institute run by the dictator's dangerous wife, Nexhmije Hoxha. As Minister for Propaganda during the early Sixties, she helped run Albania's feared Sigurimi secret police. Kadare's first novel, The General of the Dead Army, nevertheless defied the authorities by refusing to mention the word 'party'. It told the story of an Italian army officer who returns to Albania at the war's end to bury his fallen compatriots, and remains a magnificent allegory of life under dictatorship. Kadare was accommodated by the regime until he finally incurred the wrath of the Sigurimi in 1990, and defected to Paris. His latest novel, The Successor, is set in the Albanian capital, Tirana, in 1981. The country was then convulsed by summary arrests and show trials as Hoxha, virtually blind and ill from diabetes, was poised to surrender power to his Prime Minister, Mehmet Shehu. Blood is quickly on the knife in Albania, however, and Shehu was no sooner designated Hoxha's successor than he died. To this day, no one knows for sure if he was murdered or committed suicide. Foul play seems most likely, as the increasingly paranoid Hoxha had denounced Shehu as a 'multiple foreign agent' and 'traitor to the motherland'. After his death, the entire Shehu clan was arrested, persecuted or simply eliminated in a public display of gjakmarrje (revenge killings). The dead man's son, Bashkim Shehu, suffered nine years of internal exile. When I interviewed Bashkim in 1992, he told me that the individual was 'merely submerged tribe' for Hoxha. Using eyewitness reports, among them Bashkim Shehu's, Kadare brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania during the early Eighties, when Nexhmije Hoxha appeared to be running the troubled Balkan outpost singlehandedly. The husband-and- wife team had by now consigned Albania to ideological hibernation, building 900 concrete pill boxes to foil an imagined foreign invasion. Diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union had been severed after Khrushchev (a 'disgusting, loud-mouthed individual') dared to besmirch Stalin's reputation. Sino-Albanian relations, likewise, had collapsed when Chairman Mao befriended the man whom Enver Hoxha rightly believed was planning to turn Albania into the seventh republic of Yugoslavia: Marshal Tito. In this dark political thriller, Nexhmije Hoxha is an eminence grise with 'narrowed, sarcastic eyes'. Her husband, not named but referred to throughout as 'the Guide', is portrayed as a former Muslim bigwig with an interest in Egyptology and the limitless power of the pharaohs. As the book unfolds, it emerges that a 'highly placed official' was seen slipping into the successor's Tirana residence on the night of his death. A Sigurimi agent? In an extraordinary chapter, the deceased Mehmet Shehu speaks from his grave of Albania's fate after 1985 when Enver Hoxha died. During the anti-communist demonstrations of February 1991, the dictator's bronze statue was pulled down in Tirana. Shortly afterwards, Nexhmije was arrested and detained on corruption charges in Party Villa No 6, a faceless tenement off Tirana's Boulevard of National Martyrs. Having served five years of her 11-year imprisonment, Nexhmije was released in 1996 and remains Europe's last unrepentant Stalinist. Originally written in Albanian and translated from the French, The Successor provides a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power. Enver Hoxha and Ismail Kadare had once shared the same French translator, but Hoxha's dreary political tracts are less likely to survive: they were symbolically hanged from telegraph wires after Nexhmije's arrest. Though David Bellos's translation is occasionally marred by cliches ('vale of tears', 'bottomless dread'), the novel succeeds admirably. Last year, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize; many had hoped that he would become Albanian President, but Kadare says he is happiest in Paris. Book Review: The Successor. The events of this novel draw on the infinite well of human memory, whose treasures may be brought to the surface in any period, including our own. In view of this, any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable. –Ismail Kadare. Published first in 2003 (in Albanian) and translated into English in 2005, The Successor tells the tale of the death of The Designated Successor , a man who is never named and who was discovered in his bedroom, dead, on 14 December. From the start the parallels are clear. Mehmet Shehu, the heir-apparent to the poverty stricken totalitarian Albania, the third most impoverished country in the world, was discovered on 17 December 1981 in his bed, dead from a gunshot wound to the heart. In the book, as in real life, the death of the Designated Successor was quickly labeled a suicide. And in the book, as in real life, Yugoslavs across the border immediately questioned whether or not the Designated Successor would actually kill himself. Names, although occasionally parsimoniously granted to readers, are generally avoided. There is the title’s Designated Successor. Then there is The Guide, Enver Hoxha hidden under a veil thinner than anything worn by Salome. And then there is The Architect, who alone knew of a secret entrance connecting the house of the Designated Successor to that of the Guide; houses located in the elite section of Tirana known as “Bllok”. In the book it is the romance of a daughter who brings the family to ruin, while in real life it was a son. But in both cases the overwhelming and heavy presence of the Party was everywhere, in everything, a part of every thought and decision. The plot of The Successor is less a building storyline with a climax and clear conclusion and more of an illustration of the ambiance of Hoxha’s Albania. The author, Ismail Kadare, lived and wrote during the Hoxha regime; often novels, short stories, and poetry with leanings that led to immediate censure, imprisonment, and even the death of others who dared such literary privilege. And yet, Kadare didn’t seek political asylum in France until five years after Hoxha’s death. His books consistently explore turning points in Albania’s communist history, and without attempt to minimize the problems of the Stalinist regime or glorify any part of it. They are full pictures that capture the aura and the daily life of Albanians of that time. The Successor is, in that, no exception. The Successor, by Ismail Kadare. Albania, the "land of eagles", cannot complain of having been smothered in goodwill. For a long time, it was even more of an enigma than Russia, and when the bloc fell, what the world saw of it seemed unappealing. Ismail Kadare has done much to educate the west about his native land, and his new novel, based on the events surrounding the death of Mehmet Shehu, the ill-starred "Successor" to the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, is a magnificent addition to his menacing, lyrical, darkly funny oeuvre. One December morning, the man believed by all Albania to be the designated successor to Enver Hoxha, the "Guide", is found dead. Suicide as a result of nervous dep- ression is the airy official version, the first of several. Yet there is no fanfare, no mourning, no flags at half mast. Reports in the media barely graze the subject. The people ponder and gossip: was it really suicide? Or was it murder? Spies and saboteurs are never lacking in such a regime. Not long before the tragedy, the Successor's daughter, Suzana, was to have married a young man named Genc, but the engagement was terminated. Rumour runs that Genc's family was too deeply implicated in the former regime, and that the Successor had realised the terrible betrayal of the class struggle such an alliance would represent, and had moved to oppose - but too late. And then there was the matter of the beautiful house he had had built, a house which outshone that of the Guide himself. For Suzana herself, the loss of her father is yet another horrible token of the power "they" have. She is not permitted to love, and she is not permitted to question. Her brother is increasingly convinced that powers older than Hoxha's are, if not responsible, at least ancillary. A strange, forgotten aunt appears with unsettling counsel from the world communist Albania has forgotten. But is she a spy, a member of the Sigurimi, or is she herself a ghost? The family find their house part requisitioned while a long overdue autopsy is planned. Perhaps, after all, the beloved husband and father will be rehabilitated, and then they can all live in peace. The pathologist is frightened, knowing that such an important autopsy might well be his own death-warrant; the architect is frightened, fearing that he will be sacrificed as the architects of the pyramids were sacrificed; the man seen as a silhouette on the fateful night is frightened, though he is guiltless. But the prose never panics. It muses and meanders; the focus does not so much shift as glide from character to character. As a result, the reader feels a progressive tightening around the chest: you want to get out, you almost want to scream. Of Kadare's many great gifts, perhaps the most powerful is his ability to release the wraiths of that world while staying completely unruffled himself. Sometimes the most biting terrors are expressed in terms of gentle remonstrance, as when another victim of Hoxha's malice conducts an inner debate with the Guide, wondering what more he could have done. In the universe of the Guide, the dead can be "unburied" depending on their posthumous standing with him; a night can disappear at his wave. The horror of a world dominated by politely implacable furies, where everything is yes and no, where the only law appears to be the will of the dictator, rises in a choking miasma from the pages. But of course there is another, older law. Again and again, the characters find themselves, at moments either of extreme stress or of half-waking languour, remembering old saws and customs, superstitions that government diktat can ban but never dispel. Six horses ride to the ruin of a French courtier who had aroused his sovereign's envy; there is vengeance, the 1,000-year-old law of the Kanun, waiting to be reborn. And Hoxha himself, the abolisher of the old order, is ironically its personification. Kadare makes him nothing if not human and not a whit less odious for that: an envious imp of vanity and cruelty, neither grand nor robotic in his evil, but self-seeking and sentimental. The "Black Beast", his euphemism for the night of grace he grants for his former favourites to end themselves, is a "delicate" beast which he tells himself not to over-work. The Successor is strangely uplifting, despite the relentless tragedy it depicts, the tragedy of people yanked between fear and bewilderment. The final section, despite its sombreness, swings you up into the region where cruelty and pettiness are themselves left without air.