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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Que vivan los muertos ! ",
By Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The General of the Dead Army (Hardcover)
An Italian general is sent to Albania in the early 1960s to locate and disinter the bones of the thousands of his countrymen who died there during World War II. He and his partner, a sinister priest who is also an Italian Army colonel, run into a rather atypically unorganized German team doing the same. This miserable task takes a couple years. Over the course of the tale, we realize that the general is totally unpenitent and still rather hostile to those who [fighting off invasion and occupation] put his countrymen six feet under. Gradually his insensitivity is revealed as moral corruption. Neither priest nor general have clean hands. In this way, Kadare linked fascism in the 1930s and '40s to bourgeois democracy in the 1960s. While there is some truth to this, I fear that it was necessary to underline such continuity for Kadare's personal safety. As far as I know, this is Kadare's first major novel. It may not be as good as some of those which came later, but it is still a masterpiece of atmosphere and ideas. What is most amazing is how he twisted and blended fact and fiction to do a literary "slalom"---winding his way down the slippery slopes of political correctness in Hoxha's Albania in the 1960s. While being politically incorrect in modern Western societies can lead to criticism or declines in readership, it had rather more fatal consequences in the Albania of that era. So, if a little social criticism is visible now and then, it is definitely balanced by doses of the official line. (The thousands of concrete pillboxes that dot the countryside are "cold", "enigmatic" or "like Egyptian sculptures", but not wasteful or reminiscent of totalitarian paranoia.) At no point, though, does the novel read like the stodgy, boring tracts of so many Soviet authors, whose work has rightfully sunk into obscurity since 1991. On the contrary, Kadare choses to tell his well-paced story only in autumn and early winter, when rain pours down non-stop and gloom covers the Albanian mountains like the clouds and fog. The stories of various `disinterees' are told. Wartime Albania's desperate, confused chaos is revealed. Square-jawed, righteous partisans are nowhere to be seen. Some of the dialogue uttered by the Italians seems ripped from Communist tracts rather than overheard on the streets of Rome, but that would be the severest criticism I can offer. In a country where having an "unsanctioned" foreign language dictionary could lead to a ten year prison sentence, any foreign dialogue at all had to be risky. If you have ever read any Kadare, you will certainly enjoy this novel. If not, it's a good place to start. Albania may be small, but it is loaded with history and atmosphere. You don't have to be Albanian to enjoy Kadare's books.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Skeletons as Guides in Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army,
By
This review is from: The General of the Dead Army (Hardcover)
WHEN ISMAIL KADARE'S The General of the Dead Army was published in France in 1970, seven years after its initial printing in Albania, it was celebrated for its literary freshness -- for its break from the sunny imagery of social realism and the propaganda-tinted themes typical of most Socialist-era novels. Inside Albania, however, those same attributes drew criticism from Communist Party officials, threatening the 26-year-old author's literary future. But with its nationalistic nuggets and, undoubtedly, with the blessing of leader Enver Hoxha, the book survived and today is easily the best known and most critically acclaimed work of Kadare's in and outside the Balkans.
Though The General gives subtle nods to socialism and modernism, the novel's overall form resembles something rather Homeric in its portrayal of a protagonist engaged in a noble battle abroad, subject to the wrath of nature, seeking victory and, ultimately, home. UNLIKE ACHILLES or Odysseus, Kadare's proud but nameless Italian general arrives by airplane, in Albania in the mid-1960s with the mission of retrieving the buried bones of Italian soldiers killed during World War II. The general, accompanied by a military priest and the weighty expectations of the dead soldiers' families, embarks on the grisly quest with a listing of the missing soldiers, official maps, and anecdotal evidence from surviving infantrymen to help locate his "dead army." The general and the priest -- with an Albanian work crew in their command -- make their way around the countryside, exhuming Italian remains. The general's anxiety grows in tandem with the body count; he is haunted not simply by the macabre nature of the work and the animosity he senses from the Albanians around him, but most profoundly by the guilt he assumes for the soldiers' deaths. Thus begins his unraveling, marked by nightmares featuring corpses and hallucinations that amalgamate reality and fear. In one particularly tender, demented scene, the general maps ingenious new strategies for famous battles past, for he and his army of dead men. "He began making tiny sketch plans on his cigarette packet, marking the positions of the troops, his lines of attack, the points where the decisive assaults would occur ... First he surrounded Caesar, then he cut off Charlemagne's supplies, and after that he staged a whirlwind confrontation with Napoleon and forced him to retreat ... He won many battles that history says were lost. And if he did emerge the victor it was because he led his troops with skill and never abandoned them to their fate. He was a general who knew what it meant to command. And at the moment he was in the throes of a study of warfare in mountainous terrain. And besides, he had brave soldiers under him, oh yes, very brave soldiers. But the reason they're such daredevils, he thought, is that they've nothing left to lose." Seasoned by years in command, however, the general maintains a facsimile of lucidity and remains honorable to his task. After more than 12 months of searching, and with the majority of bodies accounted for -- minus that of the highly sought Colonel Z -- the general and priest prepare for their final descent from the treacherous Albanian mountains, to the capital. Before reaching Tirane, however, they encounter a wedding festival, which the general insists on attending despite the priest's protest. The stop is the general's undoing, as he's confronted by a bitter crone with the bones of the infamous Colonel Z, who hanged her husband, raped her daughter, and terrorized countless other Albanians as leader of the notorious Blue Battalion. The general's brief reprise of happiness is toppled, and in a fit of rage and realization, he kicks the Colonel's bagged bones into a rushing creek, hence wrecking his hope of receiving a hero's return. LIKE THE GENERAL who begins to see beyond the skin of the living, beyond to their bones beneath, the discerning reader can see the skeletons of archetypes that give form to The General. "As soon as I see someone -- anyone at all -- I automatically begin stripping off his hair, then his cheeks, then his eyes, as though they were something unnecessary, something that is merely preventing me from penetrating to his essence; and I envisage his head as nothing but a skull and teeth -- the only details that endure." From the powerful and lost general, to the ruthless Albanian landscape, to the pervasive presence of death underfoot, The General contains many elements typical of a tragic myth (Frye). As the novel's hero, the general has a noble deed before him, and expectations upon him. In Odyssean fashion -- not long after having "just come back from the sea" (78) and with stripes earned on tours to Africa and the Middle East -- the general leaves home for the geographically not-so-distant but spookily seclusive land of Albania, the soil his countrymen once occupied, then desecrated, and now lie in. Being a top military official, the general possesses the requisite traits and aspirations -- assumed superiority and heroism, respectively, among others. He openly enjoys the awe his uniform inspires and the esteem and privilege his position entitles him to. His movements are described as "majestic" and "lofty," and throughout his journey, the self-important words from a supporter serve as his mantra: "Like a proud and solitary bird, you will fly over those silent and tragic mountains in order to wrest our poor young men from their jagged, rocky grip." The general speaks often of the Greeks and the Trojans (51), likening his own mission to those undertaken by them during the retrieval of their dead (12). He imagines himself "like a new Messiah" to the dead soldiers who await him (14), and later, he recollects the families who gathered at his house prior to his departure as "patients waiting to be examined," he the surgeon able to remove their despair (38). But the general is, too, a compassionate man; his sense of obligation toward the dead soldiers is palpable and matched only by the animosity he harbors toward the leaders who abandoned and survived them. However, while his remorse for the slain Italian soldiers is endearing, the general displays an insidious obliviousness toward the Albanians who suffered under their occupation. Only when he's handed Colonel Z's bones does the general's suppressed anguish fully unfurl, revealing remorse for his countrymen's brutal deeds. Thus ensues the general's fall, complete in nearly every sense -- psychologically, emotionally, ethically -- except, ironically, mortally and, ultimately, morally. That the stage for this plummet is a wedding celebration -- a typically triumphant occasion -- is no coincidence. The juxtaposition of the merry fest, eerily set in the seasonably stark season of winter, against the general's hexed union with his long-sought prize, at the hand's of a "witch" (Frye), no less, throws into the relief the velocity and depth of his descent, and the tragic nature of human traditions like warfare. In fact, cycles repeat relentlessly throughout The General. Here time is incessantly predictable: swings in the general's mood; his forays between city life and the remote, frigid "underground" (Frye); bodies roused from rest then bagged, boxed and buried again; and, mostly enduringly, Albania's own embattled biography. The seasons, too, are regimentally obedient, with the chilly, wet months of fall and winter conspicuously consuming all but three paragraphs of the general's 252-page, year-long stay (163). Like the weather, the Albanian countryside is ominous, to the general's eyes, with its "menacing mountains" and their "jagged," "hostile" peaks. Collectively, these elements give the general a sense of isolation, as does his cultural ignorance. Unlike the priest, he doesn't speak Albanian and makes no effort to. He characterizes the language as "harsh" and "a fatal tongue," and views the Albanians -- from their physical form, to their manners, to their rituals -- with deep disdain. Early on he states that he "hates" them, and wishes to avenge his soldiers' deaths, and throughout he outwardly resents the curious stares of the peasants who witness the exhumations. Not surprisingly, when the Albanians' voices are allowed into the narrative, they emerge as warm, passionate, lively people, further belying the general's narrow view of his hosts. However even their stories -- tracing the fate of the prostitute, the deserter, and the partisan sniper -- echo the ubiquitous howl of death. To assuage his loneliness, the general indulges in thoughts of home, of his wife and of a brief holiday interaction with Betty, widow of the infamous Colonel Z. Though given little stage time in the novel, Betty is a vividly rendered "siren" (Frye) who spurned the general's advances purportedly in favor of those of the priest, though this is one of a handful of threads that Kadare leaves to dangle. The zenith of the general's demoralization is poignantly captured as he begs through a door, drunk and desperate to replace the 6' 1" Colonel Z's lost bones, urging the priest to forgive him for kicking the sack into the creek and to hear his proposal. "We can settle the whole business quite easily, reverend father. We can make another colonel for you ... You need a skeleton, don't you? Well I've got one! ... We've got any number of six-foot-one soldiers. If you'll just get up now, we'll choose one. There's one here in the second machine-gun company, and another here in a tank regiment ... As a matter of fact, I think I'm six-foot-one myself." But when a hotel maid discovers the general's precious list -- that virtual blueprint of his patriotism and ambition -- abandoned in the hallway, the reader... Read more ›
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Macabre Mission, and an Allegorical Tale of War's Meaninglessness,
By
This review is from: The General of the Dead Army (Hardcover)
Some twenty years after World War II, an Italian general embarks on a mission in Albania to retrieve the dead and buried bodies of Italian soldiers and return them to their home country and families. Accompanied by a fellow countryman priest, a local "expert," and a small staff of shovel-wielding laborers, this small party treks ceaselessly across the Albanian countryside and into the mountains. Thorughout this macabre, two-year exercise, remains are excavated, identified where possible, and stowed away in nylon plastic body bags. All the while, Albanian locals observe the goings on with a mixture of disbelief and distrust, the latter feelings arising from the perception that enemy soldiers are enemies, whether alive or dead. Thus, in their eyes, the unaware but well-intentioned general is building a new army, an army of the dead. Yet even as the Italian cohort shuttles from place to place retrieving its buried dead, a counterpart Albanian group headed by a lieutenant-general and a town mayor is undertaking the same task in a rather more scattershot way.
Great effort has clearly gone into planning the project: careful negotiation between the Italian and Albanian governments, drawing up of detailed maps based on interviews with fellow soldiers and the dead men's families, and descriptions of the deceased including heights and dental records. Both the general and the priest express particular interest in finding the remains of one Colonel Z., commander of a Blue Battalion unit much reviled by the Albanians for its brutality. For the general, it is a matter of honor to retrieve a fellow officer's remains at his widow's behest, but for the priest, there are intimations of more dubious favors granted or promised. In the project's early stages, all goes smoothly. Gradually, however, the grim nature of the task begins to wear on the general as heavily as the mountainous terrain and the unforgiving weather. He begins seeing himself as the Albanians must view him, as a commander of a steadily growing force that could be formed into sections and companies and battalions, eventually to become full regiments and divisions. He imagines himself leading those men during the war in such a way as to bring victory without their deaths and, later, he leads them to victories in battles fought by Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, all the way up to Korea and Vietnam. "Who would dare stand up to my Nylon Army?" he tells himself. The general's grip on reality diminishes in evident proportion to his project's percentage of completion so that, as the mission nears conclusion, he loses his sense of diplomatic perspective altogether. Ignoring the priest's warnings, the general decides one evening to attend a locals' wedding in a small town. He is received cordially as custom dictates, but coldly nonetheless, and his behavior precipitates the book's climactic crisis before tensions and emotions recede to their former banality at story's end. In some ways, the general's gradual, alcohol-fueled descent into a sort of temporary madness is strongly reminiscent of Geoffrey Firmin's far more tragic, one day, alcoholic descent in Lowry's UNDER THE VOLCANO. An interesting stylistic element of THE GENERAL OF THE DEAD ARMY is Kadare's decision to render nearly all his characters nameless. The general, the priest, the expert, the Albanian lieutenant-general and mayor, Colonel Z. - none have names, just occupational titles. Even the dead soldier whose diary the general reads is known to the locals as "Soldier." Only a few Albanians are gifted the warmth of names: Christine in Soldier's diary and the gravediggers, Reiz and Lilo. Everyone else labors in anonymity, as befits the honor of the unknown dead to whose recovered remains they are attempting to reattach names. As Kadare often does, he sprinkles his work with references to events and places in other of his novels. For example, he includes several references to the city of Gjirokaster and its citadel, to the arrival of a small band of prostitutes, and to the recovery in a downed plane of a dead English pilot's hand, all of which can be found again in CHRONICLE IN STONE. Albania is Kadare's equivalent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, a sort of ubercharacter present in all his works. It is a place whose presence and force equals that of his human characters and seems, in fact, to shape their behaviors. For example, in describing his countrymen's warlike propensities, he writes: "...the Albanians are given to war by their very nature....They hurl themselves into it with all their hearts and with eyes wide open....once they've been given a shot of it they become intoxicated...deprived of war and weapons this people would wither away, its roots would dry up and it would eventually just disappear." Yet since these words are spoken by the Italian priest by way of explanation to the Italian general, who knows if they are Kadare's views or his perspective of outsiders' views on his country?
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