Vol. 29 No. 17 · 6 September 2007
pages 9-11 | 4231 words
Feuds Corner
Thomas Jones
- BuyChronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare, translated by Arshi Pipa
Canongate, 301 pp, £7.99, May 2007, ISBN 978 1 84195 908 5
- BuyAgamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami and Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos
Canongate, 226 pp, £7.99, August 2007, ISBN 978 1 84195 978 8
- BuyThe Successor by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami, translated from the French by David Bellos
Canongate, 207 pp, £6.99, January 2007, ISBN 978 1 84195 887 3
- BuyThe File on H by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos
Vintage, 169 pp, £7.99, August 2006, ISBN 0 09 949719 0
In Broken April, a novel written in the late 1970s but set half a century earlier, Ismail Kadare describes the last thirty days of the life of a young man.[*] On the evening of 17 March, on a road through the mountains of northern Albania, Gjorg Berisha shoots Zef Kryeqyqe dead. The killing is an act of vengeance: a year and a half earlier, Zef Kryeqyqe had shot Gjorg Berisha’s brother. That murder too was motivated by revenge: Gjorg Berisha’s brother had killed a member of Zef Kryeqyqe’s family. The Berishas and Kryerqyqes have been taking it in turns to murder one another for seventy years: 22 men from each family have been killed in the feud, and Gjorg will in due course be the 45th to die. But these two families from the village of Brezftoht are not especially bloodthirsty or irascible. Their feud is one among hundreds, and the killings have all been undertaken strictly according to the arcane and intricate rules of the Kanun, the ‘code of customary law’ that has governed every aspect of the lives of the people of the High Plateau for centuries, through the years of the Ottoman Empire and now under the government of King Zog.
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[*] Vintage, 216 pp., £7.50, 2003, 978 0 09 944987 4.
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 19 · 4 October 2007
From Barbara Graziosi
Ismail Kadare managed to write and stay alive under one of the harshest Communist regimes, and for that achievement Thomas Jones is right to praise him (LRB, 6 September); but to understand his survival and success in Albania, it is equally important to investigate his wider Balkan politics. His treatment of the Slavs, in particular, is subtle and deadly. Take The File on H, the novel closely based on the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, two Harvard classicists who, in 1933, went to Yugoslavia, recorded the epics of illiterate bards, and from there made the most important contribution to Homeric scholarship of the last hundred years. The novel accurately describes their fieldwork, but for one detail: the fictional scholars make their recordings in Albania rather than Yugoslavia. There is more: as they are about to return to the US with their precious tapes and an answer to the Homeric Question, a Serbian monk from Kosovo persuades the Albanian bards to destroy the tapes of their own songs. It’s true that Lord recorded some Albanian poems in a later trip to the Balkans, but Albanian epic has made no impact on Homeric studies and remains virtually unknown. Why? In Kadare’s novel, it’s because of a Serbian monk: as ever, the Serbs dupe the Albanians and wipe out their culture. Unfortunately, readers of the novel in translation will assume that Parry and Lord really made their Homeric discoveries on the basis of a trip to Albania: the notes accompanying the Harvill edition even state as much. Kadare was a brave dissident, but he can also be seen as a committed anti-Slav nationalist.
Barbara Graziosi
Durham University
Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007
From Tom Phillips
Ismail Kadare may well be a contentious figure in the Balkans – with Serbs because of his support for the Kosovar Albanians and with Albanians because of his unexpected move to Paris shortly before the Communist regime collapsed – but Barbara Graziosi surely overstates the case when she describes his ‘treatment of the Slavs’ in The File on H as ‘deadly’ (Letters, 4 October). If, as she claims, his reimagining of Parry and Lord’s researches into Homeric epic in the Balkans is misleading because he has their fictional counterparts recording Albanian rather than Yugoslavian bards, her account of the novel is equally so.
Throughout The File on H, Kadare casts doubt on the reliability of the narrative. It is, as we’re frequently reminded, pieced together from gossip, hearsay and the accounts of variously self-interested witnesses and informers. There is no definitive version of events; everything is skewed, if not wholly thrown out of proportion, by the misperceptions and exaggerations of each individual ‘source’. The circumstances in which the fictional scholars’ tape recorder is destroyed and the motives of the attackers remain unclear, and while it’s true that the monk who appears to lodge the original idea for the attack in the mind of a hermit – who may or may not be one of the perpetrators – is a Serb, the only evidence of his involvement is the account of an enthusiastic though rather dull-witted informer, while the only accusations against him are made by an overheated and clearly biased journalist. To ascribe the opinions and beliefs of any of these characters to Kadare himself and leap to the conclusion that he is a ‘committed anti-Slav nationalist’ is absurd. On the contrary. The File on H is a satire which, like The Concert, The Successor and other Kadare novels, shows precisely how nationalism, parochialism and superstition distort the truth. The Albanians in the novel aren’t duped by a Serb, as Graziosi would have it; they are duped by their own prejudices.
As for Graziosi’s claim that readers of the English translation will come away with the mistaken impression that the real Parry and Lord made their Homeric discoveries in Albania, the translator’s note couldn’t be any clearer: ‘The bulk of the material that Parry and Lord brought back from the Balkans was gathered in Yugoslavia, not Albania.’
Tom Phillips
Bristol
