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The Pyramid

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I have four Ismail Kadare books, and since the semester just ended, ...[I'm] going to try and read all four of them this summer. Kadare is an Albanian expatriate living in France, and from what I've heard about his books, the overarching theme is either the elevation of Albanian culture or criticism of the Albanian Communist Party. In this book, Kadare takes us back to ancient Egypt during the reign of Cheops, the pharaoh who built one of the Seven Wonders of the World. What we take for granted today as an impressive monument to ...[man's] ability to create, Kadare sees as a different sort of monument. Kadare uses the pyramid of Cheops as an allegory for the dehumanization of political power.

The upper echelons of Egypt become concerned when Cheops decides he does not want to build a pyramid. His advisors tell him that a pyramid is necessary in order to head off potential unrest amongst the populace. When Egypt is prosperous, the advisors explain, the people are not occupied and may start to have dangerous thoughts. A pyramid is a long, involved process that will keep all noses to the grindstone. What follows is a nightmarish vision of power run amok. All of Egypt becomes devoted to the pyramid, with every resource available poured into its construction. Workers die by the thousands cutting the rocks, transporting the stones, and building the pyramid. Thousands more are tortured and murdered for poor workmanship or because of conspiracies that arise during construction. Even the pharaoh starts to go nuts, as the pyramid becomes a reality.

Kadare masterfully details the dangers of power without limits. Arguably, the finest chapter is the one where time itself is reduced to numbered building stones. Workmen no longer think in terms of minutes, hours, or days; they think in terms of the 10,000th stone, and then stone 10,001, followed by stone 10,002. You get the idea. In short, the pyramid turns society and the very idea of nature upside down.

...

This is probably the best book you've never heard of. Of course, if you're reading this review, you have heard of Kadare and you're thinking about reading his work. I'm certainly looking forward to his other efforts, and the guy is still pumping them out so there won't be a shortage of his books anytime soon. Albania tends to get short shrift in the world; they should be very proud of Mr. Kadare. Although this book is quite short, it has a lot of depth. Recommended.

Ismail Kadare takes a historical event of 2,600 years ago, the building of the Pyrmaid of Cheops, and creates an eery and suspense filled novel. There are intrigues and plots, and political purifications. Clearly, the monument is a testament to the human beings who built it, their spirit, creativity, their blood, sweat, and tears. However, is there some grand design, some master plan, something more, might it not represent the infinite, something eternal? Read the book and decide ... It all starts out innocently enough, the High Priest recommends a project, building a pyramid to the Pharoah who at first is opposed to the idea. Then, like any good monarch or president, he appoints a committee to study the matter. The research falls short of expectations. To the disappointment of all, or perhaps, just to this reader, it is discovered, the past pharoahs did not build the pyramids for any grand and glorious reason. They did it just because they were rich, had an overabundance of wealth, which they used up, that's all. At first the public is appalled, another pyramid is to be built, everyone ... everywhere is a buzz with, how much time, effort, and resources will it take? The plans, the building materials, the workmen, the supervisors, even diplomats of foreign countries, all are intrigued with this grand scheme. Eventually the psyche of the country is totally obsessed with nothing but this project. Many years go by, decades go by, as the project continues, and nears completion ... Kadare weaves his plot masterfully, capturing how this huge event affects the people of Egypt from all walks of life, from the peasant, to the merchant, to the highly educated scribes and aristocracy ... the parallels to modern life are astonishing. The building of the pyramid becomes the ruling force in the lives of the people. The novel is highly complex and has great depth. It becomes a psychological thriller that the reader can not put down. Although a short novel, it is packed with unsettling moments that remain with the reader, long after one finishes reading the book. Based on this novel alone, any reader can understand why Ismail Kadare is recommended for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Erika Borsos (erikab93)

The passages which evoke the actual building of Cheops' pyramid are extraordinarily powerful and impossible to forget; still, it is less the 'physical pyramid' than all it represents that Kadare seeks to illustrate - the shape it takes in the minds of many men, from the builders to the pharaoh, from the pillagers to the dignitaries. Among the pyramid's various symbolic connotations, he is especially fascinated by the power linked to it, by the hubristic ambition emanating from each of its individual pieces as well as from its finished form. Despite his deeply non-obscurantist approach, Kadare does not desacralize the pyramid: its religious/esoteric dimension is included in, rather than evacuated from, its overall significations. As the title indicates, the pyramid is indeed the book's central character - all the humans are affected by its mysterious, ineffable and frightening presence. So is the reader of this book...

The pharaoh Cheops decides to construct his own pyramid in order to suck all the wealth out of his country and prevent a higher living standard for his empire's population.
Indeed, as his counsellors whispered in his ears, when the living standard of a population rises, people become freer and more critical and endanger the dominance of the almighty powerful.

The construction of the edifice turns into a mass slaughtering. The pyramid becomes a symbol for endless human suffering and death under a despotic regime.

Of course, this book is a reflection on the political situation in Albania under the communist tyrant Enver Hoxha, but it is also a magisterial general evocation of a totalitarian ghost state, with only hidden agendas, invented complots, infighting, creation of incidents and rumours, and all that only in function of the mood and hallucinations of the tyrant.
The interrogations, tortures and executions for 'who ever knows' what reasons, create an atmosphere of terror in the whole country. The entire population becomes the plaything of the cynical and deadly machinations of the tyrant and his subservient clique.

This formidable novel is written in an unstoppable, passionate, fanatic flood of dashing prose.
A masterpiece.

indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful." Herman Melville

In 1988 the Enver Hoxha Museum was opened to the public in Tirana, Albania. The Museum, which was designed by Hoxha's architect daughter Pranvera, was built as a lasting monument to the dictatorship of her father. The Museum, now known as the Albanian International Cultural Centre, is popularly known as "the Pyramid" because of its intentional structural resemblance to the great Pyramids of Egypt. Albania's "Pyramid" at one time contained pretty much everything Hoxha had ever touched or used during his career. A its center sat an imposing marble statue of Hoxha.

The Hoxha regime was marked by the brutal suppression of dissent through fear, torture, and purges created in response to patently absurd conspiracies against the state. This type of intimidation was patterned on the conduct of Hoxha's idol, Josef Stalin. The regime was also marked by a social and political isolation rivaled in the 2oth century only by that of North Korea. It was, at its worst, an isolated nation governed by intimidation and the fear that someone may denounce you for even the simplest transgression.

In 1988 the Albanian writer and poet began drafting his novel "The Pyramid". Set in ancient Egypt the novel tracks the construction of the great pyramid that would serve as the tomb of Egypt's ruler, Cheops. Although the young Cheops is reluctant to build the Pyramid he is convinced by his Viziers that the Pyramid is not useful simply as a tomb to prepare Cheops for the next life but as a means to control the lives of the people living under the Pharaoh's rule. Although the parallels between to story line of "The Pyramid" and life under the Hoxha regime seems patently clear, Hoxha has never acknowledged any connection between his fiction and any persons or nations, living or dead. In fact, in response to a review in the New York Review of Books of another of his works, "The Palace of Dreams", Kadare vehemently denied a similar suggestion. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that this may not have been the author's intention, it is hard not to draw parallels between the cruel and brutal regime of Enver Hoxha and life under the Pharaoh Cheops while reading The Pyramid.

As the story develops we see that the magnitude of the task is exceeded only by the brutality that accompanies its construction. In addition to the thousands of people killed by construction alone we see how thousands are killed in regular purges created in response to patently absurd conspiracy theories. Kadare shows deftly how Egypt's all-encompassing focus on the construction of the Pyramid invests the Pyramid with an almost ethereal quality such that the Pyramid seems to take on a life of its own.

This short description of the plot does not give The Pyramid the justice it deserves. Kadare, who won the first International Man Booker Prize in 2005, has a writing style that shares some of the same `genetic material' that marked the writing of Kafka without ever seeming derivative. That Kadare has a style all his own is clear even if the English versions of his works have been doubly-translated, from Albanian to French and then from French to English.

To date, I have read Kadare's "Three Elegies for Kosovo", "The Successor", "The Palace of Dreams", and now "The Pyramid". I would not have gotten beyond one book, let alone four, if there was not something compelling about Kadare's story-telling. I recommend "The Pyramid" to any reader with an interest in Eastern European literature or to any reader looking to discover a `new' writer.

L. Fleisig

Aside from the translation, which is stilted and occasionally inappropriate (unlikely idioms appear in odd places), this is a harrowing little book. The Egyptian Pharoah Cheops and the story of construction of the pyramid which bears his name is the basis for an elegant parable. The casual brutality with which the tyrant exercises power seems as appropriate to ancient Egypt as it does to a Stalinist Soviet Union a Maoist China or Enver Hoxa's Albania.

The exhaustion of energies of a populace remains one of the main ways rulers or societies use to feel secure. Why do we need punishment with forced labour after all? If we are tired of hard labour we cannot think. If we cannot think we can be manipulated. The book is an outstanding metaphor that stands even in this glorified age of consummerism.

This book can best be described as a political parable. There is no political personality that anchors the novel; such as Claudius in Robert Grave's Claudius the God or such as Lincoln in Gore Vidal's Lincoln. The influence of personality is totally minimized in this parable of power. In the end, it is bureaucracy, symbolized by the Pyramid, that is the main character.

There is little of the dark humor found in George Orwell's political parable, Animal Farm. There is little of the wisdom behind the insanity found in Albert Camus' political play Caligula.

Instead, we are offered a story of how a bureacracy is developed and begins to roll, even beyond the control of its supposed masters, the ruling class. In the end we see the Pharaoh Cheops become a prisoner of this gigantic project, as much as are the poor peasants, stone masons,laborers, and architects.

Of course many reviewers make the connection between Stalin and the totalitarian communist government of Albania. However, I could not help but see the Star Wars Defense Shield, started by our own Pharoah, Ronald Reagan, as being our very own modern expensive never-ending money-pit bureaucratic burden.

All classes of the culture find a role supporting the vast pyramid bureaucracy, with the higher classes gaining the most while the lower classes die like flies in the construction of the monstrosity. Kadare's ability to show the focus on each individual stone by the architects and workers was superb, for most people, the immediate project requires full attention and the big picture is rarely comprehended. Instead, we can focus on each block, which we name and characterize.

I also thought the supposed undermining plots and sabotage were superb in that Kadare showed the plots to be all too real to the Egyptian's sensibility and belief system and yet far-fetched to our modern ear.

The strengths of this novel include the lack of dependence on mad personalties to explain the massive manner in which this bureacratic project rolled forward. It was not a project begun by insane men. It was a project initiated by the ruling class to maintain power and give supposed meaning to the actions and labor of the lower classes. It was initiated rationally, not irrationally. The bureacracy was administered rationally even as it pulled the entire society into its web.

In the end, we must all beware the tyrant, but we must also beware the state.

A few months after ascending the throne of Egypt, the new Pharaoh, Cheops, declared that he did not want a pyramid erected for him. This news was a catastrophe to his kingdom, for what would the people do if they did not spend the next umpteen years building a mausoleum for their king?

Seeing the distress of his courtiers, Cheops decreed that a pyramid would indeed be built and it would be the highest and most majestic of them all.

This is the story of the Great Pyramid in Giza; the pyramid of Cheops. It chronicles the feat of the great construction. It tells of the series of expected and unexpected deaths - from stone slippages; exhaustion; murders; whippings; and sunstroke. One foreman, Unas, was sacked because he allowed the legs of two sculptors trapped during the laying of a stone to stay where they had been amputated from the weight of the rock as it fell on top of them. Long hooks were used to scrape the crushed legs out from under the stone with great difficulty. However, it had to be done, for there was a risk that if human limbs were left to decompose, they would create a void likely to cause subsidence that, however minute, would be absolutely inadmissible in the majestic architecture of the great pyramid.

If the building of the tomb, to house Cheops after his death, proceeded too fast, those responsible were arrested and tortured for appearing to desire the Pharaoh's early death. If the pace slowed down, those responsible were tortured for lacking zeal and enthusiasm for the nation's project.

Kadare has a sardonic, witty style with a wicked sense of the absurdity of reality. It is exceedingly readable and enjoyable as history is revealed, intertwined with a twist of tongue-in-cheek humour.

Martina Nicolls, Author of "The Sudan Curse" and "Kashmir on a Knife-Edge"

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of two great legs of stones, standing stranded and in ruin in the lonely desert sands: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" When most of us bother to think about the pyramids of Egypt at all, we see them through tourist's eyes, or perhaps as Ozymandian exemplars of human vanity or imperial excess. With his short, parable-like novel THE PYRAMID, Ismail Kadare presents those great Egyptian monuments in entirely new lights, sometimes bitingly sardonic, other times morbidly humorous or harrowing in the fear they inspired and the violence they engendered.

The great pharaoh Cheops announces one day to his ministers that he has decided not to follow in his father's footsteps, not to build a pyramid. Panicked at this abandonment of tradition, the Pharaoh's ministers convene among themselves, then present their case, a triumph of political and economic irony that speaks to modern governments (totalitarian and otherwise) as well. To wit, that the pyramids were conceived as a solution to the vexing problem of societal success and wealth. As Egyptians became more prosperous, they became more independent, with freer minds that were more resistant to the Pharaoh's authority. Hence, the pyramids were intended to weigh down the populace, drain away its wealth and vitality with a public works project that would render the people more submissive and manageable. Cheops relents before this impeccable logic, and thus begins the design of Egypt's most magnificent pyramid.

At first, all is planning, and rumors run rampant. Finally, construction begins, and each numbered stone that arrives from Egypt's various quarries is recorded as to its source, its difficulty of transport and final positioning, and the number of workers killed or maimed in its handling. Rumors of subversive plots arise at regular intervals, each resulting in purges, horrible tortures, and more deaths. Superstition runs rampant as well, so that certain stones are identified as bloodied or cursed well after their placement in the structure. Cheops complicates the project still further during an imperial inspection by announcing that he wishes to be buried above ground, in the middle of the pyramid rather than below ground as already long since planned. Along the way, delegations from other nations visit the site. Some, like the laughably backwards Greeks, view the structure with awe, while others like the Sumerians study it for its political ramifications and render their analyses in reports so lengthy two horse-drawn carts are necessary to transport the numerous cuneiform tablets required for such voluminous writings.

As Cheops's great pyramid nears its completion, the pharaoh grows increasingly anxious, feeling his tomb's inexorable pull calling him to occupy his eternal resting place. Even before the Pharaoh's demise, his son Didoufri is already planning his own Sphinx-shaped monument, going so far as to cut his hair in the same manner as the Sphinx's mane. Time passes, of course, and the tombs become first the target of robbers who dare defile the mummies, then objects of graffiti and other forms of desecration, and eventually aged and graying monuments devoid of their original sheen and capstone finish. It is at this point that Kadare makes an ambitious leap, linking the totalitarian horrors of the original pyramids to later parallel horrors, such as the building of multiple pyramids constructed from human skulls by one Timur the Lame (an actual historical figure, a bloody despot of Turkish-Mongol origin known in the West as Tamerlane). One cannot help but leap to more connections, such as Stalin, the Nazi concentration camps with their piles of human remains, and the insanity of Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields. Even the book's early arguments about the political economy and manipulation of the populace from building Cheops's pyramid suggest modern counterparts - the Vietnam War (and defense spending generally) as economic stimulus, the current "war on terrorism" and the Iraq fiasco as manipulations of fear, and (in the opposite direction) the Chinese Communist Party's contradictory embrace of private enterprise capitalism as a means of civic appeasement in order to maintain its dictatorial power.

With THE PYRAMID, as with THE SUCCESSOR and THE THREE-ARCHED BRIDGE, Kadare proves himself a master of the short novel form, a dark side counterpart to Italo Calvino but with a focus on the fear, violence, and ultimate irrationality of totalitarianism. This is an engrossing story rendered in biting, easily flowing prose whose matter-of-factness amplifies the horrors of the events it describes. Reading THE PYRAMID will forever change the way you contemplate those monuments to one individual's power that ultimately only demonstrate the smallness and powerlessness of humans in the face of history.