{PDF EPUB} the Successor by Ismail Kadare the Successor by Ismail Kadare
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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.