Customer Reviews

Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In an excerpt from the publisher's preface to the French edition, we are told how Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania, disguising them as translations from a German author, bringing only a few sheets at a time to be safely stored in Paris. His intent was to ensure that the totalitarian government of Albania could not misrepresent his work - that his objections to totalitarian governments would be unmistakable. In this context, it is not surprising that these stories have a didactic bent. But who else wins the Man Booker International Prize with didactic fiction?

Yet again, Kadare is a masterful writer. The plot lines of all three works in this book are very sparse. In Agamemnon's Daughter the narrator quits waiting for a lover he know is not coming and goes to watch a parade from a grandstand - a coveted perspective. In The Blinding Order, government orders evil eyes be removed. Girl's fiance works for governmental agency enforcing order; hoped for political safety for family backfires. In The Great Wall, Chinese administrator charged with rebuilding wall misunderstands reason for the Wall ... Yet all three pieces are riveting reading - through the ruminations of the narrator, each story speaks of political and social power. In each, the ruminations take twists and turns as riveting as any plot-action. And the ruminations ring true to human experience tying into other works of Kadare (especially the The Three-Arched Bridge), mythology (Agamemnon) and history (Tamerlane). This truly is an example of fiction carrying more truth about human behavior/abuse than any factual history book ever could. Pure ecstacy to read.

This book is about dictators and while its events take place inn a small country irrelevant to the world, its story is indeed relevant to the world.
It draws comparisons with other dictators (Stalin) or leaders (Agamemnon) which in our timne would be defined as such.
Most of all this books is about the corruption that power brings to the society and especialy how those corrupt individuals, whoare in charge of our societies (politicians and great leaders) would do anything to achive their goals, including...(wish I could tell you).
I gave it only four stars, since when you are from free countries who have never been part of any kind of dictatorship, might find it to be les relevant, neverthe less this should serve as a vacination for future dictatorships, be it cultural, governmental, religious ( a dictatorship does not have to be a Government one, it can be religious, life stylre, cultural and we must be aware of its anatomy)or social.

Agamemnon's Daughter
When I studied the Albanian language at the Defense Language Institute, one of the first phrases we learned was "Jam nga Lushnja" (I'm from Lushnja). I wondered where the town was and what it was like. Lushnja is situated about 40 miles southwest of Tirana, Albania's capital. It's a small town, a former provincial capital, and it plays a role all out of proportion to its historical importance in Ismail Kadare's novel Agamemnon's Daughter.

Reminiscent of the parade in Richard Ford's Independence Day, an unknown first person narrator mixes with the crowd at a May Day celebration, on his way to an invitation only grandstand seat. Engulfed in a flood of memories, he tries to recall what he did to deserve such an invitation. He's had a relationship with the daughter of Albania's second in command, but the woman, Suzana, has broken it off, sacrificing her relationship so her father can continue his upward climb through the ranks.

One day, someone from Lushnja files a complaint to the communist party Central Committee. It's a mild mannered protest about the length of someone's dress, taken facetiously by Party regulars who receive it Slowly, the complaint gathers momentum, is viewed seriously by higher ups until it triggers the harshest reaction possible within the regime, causing dictator Enver Hoxha to invoke his most brutal tool, the "blind purge" - a wild, illogical, all consuming passion to locate dissidents, suspected or real, terminate their careers, relationships, even the lives of people caught in its unfathomable web. The anxiety and terror inflicted on ordinary people is described in brilliant and haunting detail although within the whirlwind of suspicion and heightened paranoia, even the days of our narrator could be numbered.

Previous Kadare novels typically erect elaborate allegories that embed abuses of dictatorship, but Agamemnon's Daughter is a direct confrontation with the Hoxha regime. Little wonder this book had to be smuggled out of the country a few pages at a time. To be honest, there are times when the translation is stifling, as though Kadare is being kept in a literary straightjacket. For example, on Page 8 we get: "I carried on staring at the naked parts of her body." It's hard to imagine most people reacting to such a sight with that kind of language. Later on, the writer is allowed to breathe and on page 15 we get the beautifully relaxed tone: "some of the people in the street must have been in possession of invitations just like mine. You could tell who they were, not only because they were dressed to the nines, but from their attitudes, their postures, and their beaming faces." The war of nerves the prose induces is over, and we get down to the business of seeing how the Albanian people were straight jacketed for 45 years as Kadare unleashes a parade of characters navigating their way through dictatorship: the low ranking official who's career is in tatters after he laughed at Stalin's death, the miserly G.Z., condemned to feed the regime a steady diet of tattling after a fall from grace, the uncle who takes nitroglycerin to recover from arguments with his nephew, finally the courtroom bravery of one soul who gets pushed to his death in a chrome mine. All are portraits Kadare adds to the mosaic about dictatorship he has compiled over the years.

Note: Mr. Brewer's translation of Ismail Kadare's essay Aspects of Dictatorship appears in the Winter 2011 edition of Michigan Quarterly Review.