Customer Reviews

The File On H.: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

The H of the title is Homer (of Odyssey and Iliad fame), and the central figures of this tragicomic satire are two Harvard researchers who arrive in Albania during the reign of King Zog (1930s) to study the oral epic tradition and its relation to Homer. Armed with the newly invented reel-to-reel tape recorder, they set themselves up a remote region where they will convince passing "rhapsodes" to recite epics into the tape recorder for later analysis. Alas, the idea of this is so preposterous to the paranoid Albanian authorities that they assume the two researchers are spies, and so order the governor of the remote province to keep a close eye on them. He, in turn, enlists the services of his most trusted informer, Dull Baxhaja, whose florid reports are the primary enlivener of the governor's dull days.

Somewhat wacky hijinks ensue, as the governor's wife dreams of a romantic assignation with one of the researchers, and Dull's reports grow more and more darkly comic. Originally written in 1981, the book is eerily prescient with regard to contemporary nationalist Balkan politics, as a wandering Serbian monk enters the story, takes umbrage that the researchers are not interested in Serbian epics, and stirs up trouble for them. At the same time, the theme of paranoia and emphasis on the rivalry between various informers is itself a satire on the grim nature of Communist Albania under the Hoxhas. Amidst all this, Kadare is also trying to say something about the elusive nature of art and historical memory. The overall effect is a little muddled, but not unenjoyable.

Note: The novel grew out of Kadare's 1970 meeting in the with Albert Lord, a notable scholar of oral epics who told Kadare of his travels in the former Yugoslavia as the assistant to Milman Parry during 1933-35. Affiliated with Harvard, Parry and he engaged in much the same kind of research as the two characters in the novel -- albeit with rather more successful results. In fact, part of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard has been digitized, and it is now possible to hear some of their field recordings online!

Unique, witty, and very comedic but still not one of my favorite Kadare books. Perhaps it lost more in translation than some others have, or perhaps it is just not to my tastes. I still recommend others of his books to readers before they try this one. This is a wonderful book for the die-hard Kadare fan but will do little to make you such a fan in the first place.

Another great work by Ismail Kadare. Albania of 1930s is in this book. His style of writing allows you to be part of each character's feelings and deeper thoughts. You will find the past, the present and the future of Albania and its mentality intermingled with the quest for the survival of the epic song.

Published in Albanian in 1981, translated into a French version in 1989, and thence into English from the French version in 1997, Ismail Kadare's THE FILE ON H is nevertheless a triumphant novella of Balkan dark humor and fatalism. As he so often has in his other works, Kadare pulls back the covers on the arbitrary nature of life in a totalitarian state and its effects on everyone from government officials to the lowliest hermit. The day may well yet arrive when Kadare receives the Nobel Prize for Literature to the typically American reaction, "Who?"

THE FILE ON H follows a relatively simple plot line. Two Irish researchers in Homeric literature, Bill Norton and Max Ross, travel from Harvard to Albania in the 1930's. Their mission: to use a wondrous new technology, the voice recorder, to capture on tape the epic poetry of Albania's lahuta players, a vanishing breed of wandering singers who for generations have carried forward the country's oral story-telling tradition. By capturing and studying different renditions of these epic tales, even comparing the same lahuta player's multiple versions of the same epic sung over a period of weeks, Norton and Ross hope to gain new understanding of how such Greek epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey developed and evolved without having been written down, and perhaps as well Homer's true role therein as author, reteller, redactor, or cataloger. Thus, they have come to the last remaining locale where oral epics are still sung, and by default the only place where they may in fact still be evolving.

Naturally, the arrival of two Westerners with such magical machinery engenders suspicion that they are spies. This judgment is only furthered along the way by the foreigners' insistence that they not remain in the more refined city of N___, that they wish instead to spend up to three or four months in a thousand-year-old inn known as the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo. As a precautionary measure, the governor of N___ assigns his trusted informer, Dull Baxhaja, to watch and report on the two Irishmen's activities in the hopes of uncovering their real plans. All goes well at the Buffalo Inn, and Ross and Nelson are convinced they are simultaneously preserving a dying craft and gaining valuable new insights into the Homeric tradition. One day, a mysterious Serbian monk named Dushan appears at the Inn and sets in motion a chain of events that bring the full impact of a thousand years of ethnic and political enmity crashing down on the two unsuspecting classicists and their project with unintentionally ironic results.

Kadare is immensely playful as he unrolls his story. Nelson and Ross arrive speaking Albanian, but their version is as hilariously outmoded as Old English would be to an American. Dull Baxhaja, the governor's spy, is given to writing reports full of magnificently convoluted sentences and over-the-top grammatical flourishes, to which the governor of N___ only shakes his head in utter admiration. The nature of spying itself is dissected into ocular and aural components, with Dull Baxhaja as an "ear specialist" who has developed his skills to withstand all manner of distractions. At the same time, Kadare mixes in the threat of the new tape recording technology that can steal the lahuta players' songs while instantly obsoleting listening skills such as Baxhaja's. He also commingles the visual nature of spying with the incipient blindness of the researcher Bill Norton, the curiously poor eyesight of so many of the lahuta players, and the literary tradition that pictures Homer as a blind, wandering minstrel. Is the ability of these remarkable story-tellers to assimilate and repeat perfectly these lengthy narratives related in part to their blindness, Norton and Ross wonder.

For a short novel, THE FILE ON H is rich in playful conjectures and comedic characters and situations. The meeting of the Serbian monk with the hermit Frok is one such instance, as are the romantic meanderings of the governor's wife Daisy and her surprising interaction with another Albanian spy, the only such individual in the country who speaks English. In his final pages, however, the author unveils his own little surprise for Norton and Ross and their explorations of epic poems as living things. THE FILE ON H presents Ismail Kadare at his best, as a cautionary story-teller of the first order exploring one of the West's darkest and most historically convoluted places.

I found this novel one of the less successful works of Ismail Kadare.

It is a mixture of a literary research tale and a political spy novel with 'Madame Bovary' aspects.
Two Irish researchers are looking for old Albanian epic poems in order to discover the enigma of the composition of H(omeros)' epics. The government thinks that they are spies, while the governor's wife dreams of an extramarital affair.
The essential background problem is the division of Albania which was forced to give up Kosovo to Serbia. Even the assignment of epic poems to Albania or Serbia turns out to be an insurmountable problem!

I found the mixture a little bit improbable and the political reactions more or less exaggerated.
This book is still a very worth-while read, although it doesn't reach the same high level as Kadare's masterpieces, e.g. 'The General of the Dead Army' or 'The Pyramid', which treated universal human problems.

This book is an achievment not only for Kadare's literary work; it is also philosophy together with art history and national genesis.

This book would be much more fun to read in Albanian, or if translated directly from Albanian. As in most of his other works Kadare manages to perfectly incorporate Albanian history/culture/values in the plot. Kadare does an indespensable service to Albanian culture, by providing the reader with an account of Albanian legends and ways of life. The main point of this book is to remind the readers that Albanian/Illyrian and Ancient Greek culture, mythology are much closer than assumed. And that they were in a complex (give and take) relationship. Kadare says all this in a beautiful way!