The Concert: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ismail Kadare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1994

A group of Albanian friends are torn apart by the political turmoil of the mid 1970s, as the nation's diplomatic ties with China begin to unravel, and their personal entanglements follow suit in the face of governmental insecurity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the mid-1970s, as the alliance between Albania and Communist China unravels, this subversively inventive satire traces the impact of the zigzagging Albanian party line on the personal lives of a group of friends and associates. These include a jittery Albanian diplomat in Beijing, his jealously insecure wife, an establishment novelist who confronts "the void inside him" and a civil servant who writes an "autocritique" castigating himself for his petty-bourgeois mentality. A Kafkaesque subplot concerns an army officer who's arrested, apparently for refusing to obey an order. Albanian novelist Kadare ( The Palace of Dreams ), who lives in France, sketches a devastating portrait of Mao Zedong as a megalomaniac whose goal is "the brainwashing of the human race." Historical figures like Zhou Enlai and genocidal Cambodian leader Pol Pot appear intermittently in an elliptic narrative spliced with dreams, officers' coerced confessions and short-short stories. China, depicted as a dystopia where simple human relations are stultified and surveillance is a way of life, becomes a mirror image of Albania through Kadare's mordantly ironic vision.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Under communism, foreign relations between a smaller country and the huge country that serves as its "host" affect the day-to-day lives of many individuals, especially in the smaller country. An Albanian by birth now living in France, Kadare (The Palace of Dreams, LJ 9/1/93) shows how Albania's relationship with China affects the life of Silva Dibra, a government employee, wife, and mother. The endless succession of her days seem to blend together as Silva worries about her husband, Gjergi, who makes sudden and frequent trips to China, and her brother, Arian, who is in the military. She also thinks constantly about her dead sister, Ana. Through Silva, we learn the thoughts of too many other characters: her husband, daughter, brother, co-workers, endless friends, Chairman Mao, Zhou En-lai, and a stream of other Chinese bureaucrats. There are some good, funny ideas here, and a number of chapters would work effectively as short stories. Strung together, however, they create what is essentially a plotless novel that strains the reader's interest.
Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. PL, Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 443 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co (December 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688097626
• ISBN-13: 978-0688097622
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,584,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best of the century, December 18, 2002

By 

Andrew Ng Hock Soon "just a reader" (Perth, Western Australia Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Concert (Paperback)

this book is amazing. it's so sweeping in scope and vast in its concerns. chronicling the decline and eventual fall of the diplomatic ties between albania and china, the novel centers on several characters whose lives are directly and indirectly implicated by the sinister game-play of doublespeak and ambivalent symbolic gestures which are hallmarks of chinese politics. this novel is relentless in its critical view of a very complicated relationship, but it does not fall into the trap of blaming or accusation on either. instead, Kadare carefully delineates the various nuances emitted by the Chinese government which are then carefully, if not always successfully, interpreted by the Albanian government so as to chart the next political move. Mao Zedong is given a certain prominence here, and the novel's marvellous rendition of this strange man and his predilection with death and the theatre would give any psychoanalyst a field day. in my view, the most compelling section of the novel is the interchapter of the tragedy of macbeth, which can be read as a cleverly intertext of the history of the power-struggle between Zedong and his marshall, Lin Biao, and/or as the superior-subordinate dialectic between China and Albania. truly, Kadare is one of the 20th (and the 21st) century's most important writer, and this novel is enough to vouch for his excellence.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing novel about power, June 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Concert (Paperback)

This novel is often considered as the second in the "winter series" of Ismail Kadare. The first one is "The Great Winter" dealing with the worsening relations between Albania and the Soviet Empire. "The Concert" appeared in Albania in 1988, and dealt in turn with the relations between communist China and Albania. Kadare profited from the communist world's internal cleavages, and pretending to denounce and critizice the Albanian state's enemy (that is, the Chinese regime), he actually denounced Communism itself. The novel has lengthy descriptions of the Chinese dictator at that time, Mao Tse Dung, and deals with the Chinese culture in general, although it is by no means trying to faithfully make it approachable to readers. The main character is an Albanian writer, who is sent to China in a particularly difficult period in the relations of the two countries. Ismail Kadare masterfully describes the intrinsic communist politics. The novel is wonderfully written, has a terrific plot, and is an amazing witness on the power-play.