The File On H.: A Novel [Paperback]

Ismail Kadare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2002

In the mid 1930s, two young American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic, with one of the world's first tape recorders in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works such as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever writing them down. Their research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans and, mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance. Research and intrigue proceed apace, until a Serbian monk plots a violent end to their project.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Controversial Albanian dissident Kadare (The Concert) takes on the big H, Homer, in this comic tale of small-town suspicions and a doomed academic venture. The time is the 1930s, and Albania is already in a state of paranoia under King Zog, with informers everywhere. Enter two Irishmen from Harvard, Bill Ross and Max Norton, who journey to Albania with a tape recorder in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. But can Governor N., head of the department where Bill and Max set up shop, believe such a preposterous pretext? He puts his best spy, Dull Baxhaja, on the case. In the meantime, his wife, an Albanian Emma Bovary, dreams of an affair with one or another of these crazy scholars. The relationship between the governor and Dull Baxhaja, a veritable artist of eavesdropping, is a masterpiece of Gogolian comedy. But Kadare's chief interest (though not necessarily his readers') is in the scholars' quest. "We're trying," Bill writes in his journal, "to put ourselves inside Homer's skin to understand what kind of tyrannical power he must have had to contain such a bubbling caldron of artistic activity." Kadare transparently questions the status and condition of his own art in this amusing parable. It is a pity that no one could be found to translate the novel from Albanian, especially given the many infelicities of Bellos's secondhand dialogue.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Two American researchers head into 1930s Albania with a tape recorder in search of the Homeric oral tradition but find unexpected complications. A stuffedshirt bureaucracy that against all evidence thinks them spies provides only limited hindrance, but a violent Serbian monk who resents Albania getting the credit sets out to stop them. For good measure, throw in a dreamy governor's wife, who fantasizes about an affair with one of the foreigners, and some real spies, including Dull Baxhaja, whose florid prose in missives about the foreigners makes the governor drool, and you are bound for a complicated outcome. Without giving away too much, the researchers head home lacking hard evidence, one of them going blind, seeming to become a rhapsody himself. Kadare (The Pyramid, LJ 4/1/96) and translator Bellos consistently get the tone just right, and their product is both slyly funny and wistful. Recommended for all world literature collections.?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (June 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559706279
• ISBN-13: 978-1559706278
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,550,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suspicion keeps everyone in the dark, May 23, 2000

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The File On H.: A Novel (Hardcover)

Two Irish-American scholars of Homeric ballads arrive in remote northern Albania to record local epic songs in the early 1930s. Nobody has ever seen a tape recorder before. The two men speak archaic Albanian learned from books. Local officials are sure they are spies. (But why there ?) Informers are positioned to report every move and word. A local official's wife longs for an affair. Weird monks and treacherous Serbians move in. It's a strange mix of satire and scholarship, farce and fact. Kadare constructed this novel on the basis of an actual American `expedition' to the Balkans to collect ballads in order to study the process by which such epics were remembered, forgotten, and reshaped. Though the Harvard scholars' efforts ended in a completely different manner, Kadare used this seed to create THE FILE ON H. H in this case is not like Kafka's K or Ian Fleming's M, a nameless individual, but stands for Homer.

In Hoxha's Albania, writing satire on spies and attitudes towards foreigners was doubtless dangerous. Kadare got away with it only because he set the novel in the royalist period of 1928-1939, when Albania was under King Zog. It is an enjoyable book, though not as stunning as some of his others (i.e. "Broken April", "The Three-Arched Bridge", "Chronicle in Stone") The translation, too, may not be as strong as it could have been. As an American with some familiarity with Ireland, I found his Irish-American characters much less believable than his Albanian ones. Their actions and dialogues often don't ring true. But, as another volume in his literary panorama of Albanian history and sentiment, this novel is well worth reading. It contains many flashes of the Kadare genius.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even A. B. Lord must be laughing in his grave, June 7, 2002

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The File On H.: A Novel (Paperback)

This volume is a delightful story that immediately reminded me of Lord's The Singer of Tales. Two Irish Homeric scholars set out to record the songs of the epic-singers, to compare versions told at different time and/or by differents singers ... does that sound like Lord's research? Here, however, it is the story of collectors of the epics and the internal security officers of Albania that are the heart of the story - a very funny story poking fun at ignorance, fear, position ...

When the Irish researchers arrive, the governor's wife has day dreams of an affair, the office of the Interior Ministry has dreams of snaring the perfect biographer, the governor is out to snare the spies with counterspies who don't know English, a Serbian monk who tries to insure that the epics are recognized as Serbian not Albanian ...

This book is an absolute joy to read - a witty commentary on totalitarian government and the manipulation of people.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A curious little book, May 24, 2000

By 

"javits2000" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The File On H.: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is an engaging book, but it's not as good as most of Kadare's work. Two Homeric scholars travel to Albania to study and record that nation's epic poetry. They are met with suspicion on the part of King Zog's bureaucrats, who assume they must be spies. As in all of Kadare's novels, the Albanian people and landscape are evoked with an extraordinary sympathy. However, the Americans, ostensibly the novel's heroes, are surprisingly flat characters. One gets the feeling that Kadare is too attached to his homeland to imagine how an outsider would view it. Still, the subject of the Albanian epic is fascinating, and very few English-language works (original or translated) address it at all. This novel, as well as Kadare's _Palace of Dreams_, provides an enjoyable introduction.