From Publishers Weekly
In 1981, on a December night, the designated successor to Albania's tyrannical "Guide" died of a gunshot wound; the Albanian news reported it as a suicide, but rumors spoke of murder. The search for the story of that night spirals inward from the speculations of foreign intelligence analysts to the posthumous and fragmentary recollections of the successor himself. Through those, we see his daughter twice forced to abandon love that conflicted with her father's ambitions, and his son clapped in irons when doctrine required it. As Kadare explores the perspectives of those caught in the successor's orbit, past and present, it becomes apparent that he is investigating not only the fate of a man, but the nature of truth when the symbol one becomes outweighs the human one is. Kadare (
Broken April) was awarded this year's Man Booker International Prize, given for a body of work rather than a single book; Arcade will re-release six other Kadare novels simultaneously with this one. The successor is based on Mehmet Shehu, destined to take over for dictator Enver Hoxha, and Kadare infuses his character with magical realist horror. Even in this clunky translation (from the French, as opposed to the original Albanian), Kadare stands with Orwell, Kafka, Kundera and Solzhenitsyn as a major chronicler of oppression.
(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Albanian novelist Kadare received the first Man Booker International Prize, an outgrowth of England's prestigious Booker Prize. May the award draw more readers to this sublimely disquieting artist. Kadare here expands upon an incident late in his nation's Communist era. The designated successor to
the Guide (dictator Enver Hoxha) is shot to death in his bed one night. "Suicide or murder?" is the question in everyone's mind. In seven chapters laced with the blackest comedy, Kadare plumbs the souls of those most affected: the successor's daughter (whose engagement her father had recently squelched), the minister of the interior (the nation's ultimate police chief), the architect who remodeled the successor's elaborate house (and knew of a secret passage to the Guide's nearby home), the Guide (who rather relishes skulduggery), and the successor himself as a spirit. Oh, yes, also intelligence agencies everywhere, which must begrudgingly dust off the Albania files. Answers are found to the big question, but not, perhaps, solutions. Meanwhile, the heart's ineradicable darkness is exquisitely, painfully reconfirmed.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
