The Successor [Paperback]

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon.

"It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." That was how Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union. If Churchill found the USSR mysterious he would have been totally perplexed by life in Albania during the isolated, despotic regime of Enver Hoxha. Ismail Kadare's "The Successor" captures that inscrutable mystery in a masterful fashion.

Ismail Kadare is an Albanian poet and writer. He is also the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and was selected from a list of nominees that included Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Milan Kundera, and Gunter Grass. His latest work published in English, The Successor, is a remarkable book that provides the reader with evidence that Kadare's award was well-deserved.

The "Successor" of the title is Mehmet Shehu. Shehu was, until shortly before his death, Enver Hoxha's right-hand man. Shehu was a commander of a Communist-led partisan brigade during the Second World War and had a reputation for brutality that led to his promotion to a division commander of the National Liberation Army. After the communist takeover of Albania Shehu led a purge of those party members suspected of being aligned with Yugoslavia's Tito after Tito's break with Stalin and the USSR. Hoxha, referred to as "the Guide" throughout the book, took Shehu under his wing and Shehu was known throughout Albania as "Number 2". As is often the case being "Number 2" was a precarious perch to sit on in regimes where aging tyrants (Stalin and Hoxha both come to mind) often struck out at those closest to them as their own mortality seemed to weaken them. Shehu was no exception. On December 17, 1981 after an apparent split with Hoxha over Albania's continued isolation from the world, Shehu was found dead in the bedroom of his newly renovated house. A gunshot wound to the head was the cause of death, one quick ruled a suicide. Shehu's death and the speculation as to the cause of his death form the heart of Kadare's "The Successor".

The book plays out like a parlor room mystery by Agatha Christie but one influenced by Franz Kafka's The Trial and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Neither the reader (nor anyone in Albania for that matter) knows whether the Successor committed suicide or was murdered. All the doors to the house were locked, but there was a secret passageway installed during the house's renovation. There are a number of possible suspects including the Guide, the Guide's "Number 3" man and successor to the successor, the Successor's wife and daughter and the daughter's former fiancé. Kadare takes us into the tortured mind of all the suspects. They each in their own way have some feeling of culpability for the Successor's untimely death, no mater the cause. As we read the thoughts of each player in this parlor room drama Kadare paints a vivid portrait of life in Albania during the Hoxha regime. The inexplicable, never to be determined cause of death is reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial. The world of party purges where one, like the Successor, ends up accepting ones unhappy face as a result of a system he was partly responsible for bears a stark similarity to the atmosphere portrayed by Koestler in Darkness at Noon.

Kadare's prose is very well crafted even though this edition is a translation from the French which in turn is a translation from the original Albanian. It must be hard to retain much of the original flavor of a novel after two translations but despite that hardship the chapters and scenes shift from real to dream-like in an almost unspoiled fashion. This shift lends an aura of surrealism to the story, one that seems perfectly appropriate to a society for which surrealism was the norm rather than the exception.

Kadare's Successor is a wonderful, thoughtful book. For anyone interested in Kadare's work, his Three Elegies for Kosovo was also one I found immensely enjoyable. Although both books deserve to be read, I think that my having read the somewhat more accessible Three Elegies for Kosovo first enhanced my enjoyment of The Successor. However, The Successor stands up perfectly well on its own.

Ismail Kadare's THE SUCCESSOR, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for 2005, lays bare with devastating intensity the nightmare of life under the totalitarian regime of an aging and merciless dictator. This short novel will grab you by the throat and refuse to let go until you've finished, leaving you breathlessly contemplating how life can be lived on such impossible terms.

In Kadare's horrifying world, nothing is fixed - truth, reality, even time are all relative, subject to the manipulation and caprice of a single individual. Kadare's story revolves around the mysterious nighttime death of the Successor, the man designated as Number Two in the Albanian government and modeled after the real-life Mehmet Shehu. Number One is known only as the Guide, a solitary and all-powerful dictator (modeled on Enver Hoxha, the country's former dictator) whose growing sightlessness is mirrored by his growing paranoia. What really happened on the stormy night of the Successor's death? Did he commit suicide as first thought, or was it murder? What about that rumored tunnel running from the Guide's residence to the Successor's and the surprising discovery that its door could only be opened from the Guide's side? What of the role of Hasobeu, the minister of the interior and presumptive successor to the Successor, who was seen twice after midnight outside the Successor's home on the night of those fateful events? What did the Guide actually want of Hasobeu? As well, what was the role of the Successor's over-reaching architect, who surely knew of the tunnel's existence and blames his artistic vision for the Successor's death?

The entire capitol holds its collective breath for the Guide's decision - suicide or murder, and if the latter, who would be the designated perpetrator. Time passes, roles change, the Successor's family is evicted from their home, the Successor's daughter laments that her romantic life has been sacrificed for her dead father's welfare and that of the State, Hasobeu faces his political downfall in the face of the Guide's "black beast," and everyone else tries to gauge which "truth" will affect them least. In the end, the shocking facts are suggested, but like everything else in Albania's megalomaniacal world under the Guide, who can know for sure? Not even the Successor's ghost can assure us unequivocally of what happened.

Comparisons of THE SUCCESSOR to Kafka's THE TRIAL and THE CASTLE seem inevitable for their similar content as well as their Eastern European origins. Yet where Kafka assumed the viewpoint of innocent and unsuspecting citizens trapped in a faceless bureaucratic maze, Kadare carries us into the seat of power and, more particularly, to those surrounding and even aspiring to occupy it and their families. From that vantage point, THE SUCCESSOR harkens back to the spiritual and emotional desolation of books like Garcia Marquez's THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH and NOBODY WRITES TO THE COLONEL. And just as the Patriarch and the Colonel transcend the world of South America, Kadare's Guide represents not just Albania, but self-preservation-seeking theocracies and dictatorships everywhere, from Afghanistan under the Taliban (read THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL by Yasmina Khadra) to Cambodia under Pol Pot, Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Soviet Union under Lenin and Khrushchev (read almost anything by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).

It is difficult to know what may have been lost in translating this book second hand from the French translation of the original; perhaps one day a direct translation will be available out of the Albanian. Regardless, this edition as translated by David Bellos retains more than enough power and sense of dread to justify making THE SUCCESSOR accessible to English readers. This is a compelling fictional account of life beholden to tyrannical whimsy in a place where (to paraphrase Karl Marx and turn his indictment of capitalism back onto Soviet-styled regimes) all that is solid has already melted into air and all that is sacred has already been profaned.

As Ismail Kadare says so eloquently in his dedication, "...any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable." Amen, sadly.

This novel is based on actual events: the Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha ("the Guide" in this book) denounced his long-standing premier and presumed heir, Mehmet Shehu ("the Successor"), who then was said to have shot himself. Whether he was murdered or committed suicide is the question at the centre of this book, and Kadare offers an ingenious answer in the last chapter. The whole book is suffused with the fear and paranoia prevailing in a country ruled by suspicious and devious tyrant: the terror felt by those near to him and by their families; the sycophantic rivalry for his favour; the dread felt by people like doctors or architects asked to work for someone in the government in case their work is dangerously caught up in some unpredictable political manoeuvre; the cautious and nervous gossip of the population; the attempt of foreign governments to make sense of what was happening in that hermetically sealed country.

Kadare has been fortunate in his translators. Most of his books have been translated from the Albanian into French and then from the French into English - in this case by David Bellos. This is the eighth novel of Kadare's that I have read and between them there have been at least seven translators - but they all capture Kadare's unmistakeable clean and simple style.