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Spring Flowers Spring Frost

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I have been a devotee of Kadare's previous books (and this one, like those, has been beautifully translated, this time by David Bellos); but I am afraid I found this one less satisfying. Unlike his other books, the treatment in this one can only be described as surrealistic. He moves between a number of themes - the story of Tantalus, the story of Oedipus, the sinking of the Titanic, an Albanian fable by which a young girl is married to a snake - whose relationship to the main story can perhaps be worked out by readers more sensitive than I am. And one never knows quite where one is, whether in a dream world or a real world, whether the central character is an artist or a deputy chief or police or both. The book also ends inconclusively: one's expectation that the fate of the characters will be resolved is not fulfilled.

I take the main theme of the book to be the disappointment with what happened in Albania when the Communist dictatorship collapsed. The vacuum this left was in part filled by a revival of the Kanun, the ancient code, which the communists had suppressed, of unending bloody vendettas between families. Kadare has written about the Kanun before, in Broken April, where one of his characters showed a romantic fascination for its "noble savagery" (see my review of that book). Now there is no longer any half-acknowledged admiration: only despair that such barbarity wells up again from the remote past, even while the shadows of the communist past still hover over the society and the Council of Europe is an ineffectual occasional presence. The tyranny of communism has been ended; but this is a melancholic and often poetic image of a society that is uneasily adrift.

After 40 years of Enver Hohxa's totalitarian rule the new democracy came in many fits and starts to Albania. Ismail Kadare explores the conflicts and contradictions left over from the old regime in a remote mountain town. People are still disappearing never to be heard from again. The secret police appears to remain in place and operating in the shadows. The blood feuds of the ancient rule book, the "Kanun", are rumoured to being revived. And the stories that the ominous secret state archives are hidden in vaults in the local area won't die. In this tense and confusing time, Mark Gurabardhi, a portrait artist, strives to live a "normal" life. With Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Kadare has created an intriguing and engrossing story of realities and imaginations during a complicated period in his homeland. Kadare, who resides in France, was the inaugural recipient of the Booker International Prize and has only since then become better known in the English speaking world.

In "Spring Flowers, Spring Frost", history and legends mix with the banal day-to-day events of the protagonist's life. Greek mythological characters, such as Tantalus and Oedipus, mix with historical figures such as Brezhnev. The iceberg that was rammed by the Titanic takes on consciousness and presents its perspective of the tragedy. In his nightmares, Mark is imagining himself in an alternative role of a secret police officer. Or does he actually lead a double life and these are not dreams? Mark's model and girlfriend has secrets of her own that make her aloof and possibly dangerous to Mark. Can he help at all? Meanwhile his friend Zef is still missing... Kadare succeeds in creating an atmosphere of insecurity and suspense. Facts and imaginings increasingly intermingle, thus creating new realities.

Kadare's Albanian work was doubly translated: into French and from that into English. The excellent work by David Bellos makes the reader forget the language distance between the original and this version. Bellos captures the style and tone exquisitely and conveys the rich and poetic language that Kadare has employed. Bellos' account of his discussion with Kadare and reflection on indirect translations are an interesting complement which, unfortunately is not reproduced in the book itself. [Friederike Knabe]

SPRING FLOWERS, SPRING FROST is without doubt Ismail Kadare's most ambitiously experimental novel. On one level, it is the chronological tale of a modestly successful painter named Mark Gurabardhi who lives in the Albanian town of B__ at the close of the Twentieth Century. The former Communist regime has fallen, and the springtime of a new way of life has arrived. New ways and old traditions are competing for primacy in the peoples' lives. As these changes unfold around him, Mark maintains an off again, on again relationship with a young woman who also models for him, but his life is otherwise rather empty of meaning. He works in the kind of cultural institute typical of socialist/communist states, but he has no meaningful relationships with anyone there. His lone friend, the mysterious Zef, never appears in the book, represented instead by his apartment's constantly unlit window as seen from the street.

On another level, however, Kadare presents a series of antic digressions that he labels Counter-Chapters. In one, a virginal young woman is married off by her family to a snake, although it turns out after the ceremony that the snake converts in the evenings into a handsome young husband who sheds his snakeskin for the marital bed. In another Counter-Chapter, the mythological Tantalus has stolen immortality from the gods, who hurriedly marshal their forces (including those of Death) to rein Tantalus in and ultimately punish him for the contrived and different offense of "voracity" based on an insatiable appetite. In yet another instance, Mark the painter becomes Mark the police investigator conducting an interrogation over a secret set of government files.

Kadare alternates these realities and infuses all of them with Kafkaesque characteristics and a sardonic humor about life in a dictatorial, socialist state. On one level, the end of the latest regime (presumably that of Albania's Enver Hoxha) signals limited new freedoms and even an awakening to Western Europe. Yet, at a deeper and more threatening level (as can be seen in present-day China), the removal of a heavy-handed dictatorship and police state opens the door to incipient anarchy. New values and old ways rush in to fill the void. For Kadare's Albania, the void is filled by a form of blood lust in the form of an ancient tradition called the Kanun, based on something called the Book of the Blood. Under these ancient rules, there are blood debts to be paid or exacted by one family against another by murder, but each such paid debt automatically creates a new one in its place, in the opposite direction. Kadare's protagonist inadvertently gets caught in the middle of one such debt and struggles to find a way out.

From its opening page image of two children uncovering a hibernating snake in wintertime, SPRING FLOWERS, SPRING FROST conveys an atmosphere of threat, of terrors and troubles lurking just beneath the surface of life. Kadare presents numerous references to caves, icebergs, tunnels, old chests hidden in closets, and coffins, suggesting that the most violent and anarchic of Albania's traditions lie forever dormant like hibernating snakes, waiting for the removal of authoritarian government in order to re-emerge. Yet even the most ancient and brutal of these practices must find a way to merge and meld with everything else forbidden under the former Communist Party rule, from unrestrained art to open political discussion.

In much the same vein, the author conveys a strong sense of smoldering sexuality lying dormant: the story of the virgin married to the snake/man, references to Oedipus Rex, overtly Freudian references to bush-shrouded cave entrances, and even allusions to Beatrice, Dante's guide to Paradise in the Divine Comedy. In Kadare's world, all are intertwined and all are relative, subject as much to the power of tradition as to the inscrutable power of the State. Mark Gurabardhi is as powerless to control his fate as is Kafka's Joseph K. The atmosphere is one of helplessness and abandonment. Surveying a birdless sky of motionless clouds, Mark thinks, "Things must have looked more or less like that when...the gods deserted earth. A sky bereft of its masters, a sky in mourning, stretching to infinity. Who knows why the gods left? Where in the universe did they go? Mark didn't know why, but he felt like crying."

As always with Kadare, an original and unforgettable tale of life we can hardly imagine in a place we can hardly understand.

What do the thief of immortality from Mt. Olympius, Oedipus, an Albanian folktale of a snake-bride, the fall of Communism in Albanian, the death of the director of an art institute, blood-law and love have in common? Very little unless in the hands of a novelist as skillful as Kadare.

The very structure of the novel indicates a less-than-linear style. Chapter 1 is followed by Counter Chapter 1 etc. This structure permits Kadare to present a relatively simple and straight forward account of a love affair in the context of the post-Communist confusion of Albania. The protagonist, an artist assigned to the local town's art center, reminisces about the past - the "justice" and oppression. He explores his discomfort with the present. And, most importantly, he mulls over the universal questions raised about crime, death, punishment, freedom, oppression, ... in light of the material presented in the Counter Chapters. The Counter Chapters present the tales from mythology and folklore i.e. Tantulus, Oedipus, Snake-Bride.

The whole coheres splendidly. The book truly earned its awards: New York Times Notable Book, Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, The Man Booker International Prize ...

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

There are two tracks in Ismail Kadare's book, the world of politics and the world of domestic interpersonal relations. Kadare has always been great when there are political points to make because he can wrap them in myth and allegory so that they form a seamless and almost cinemagraphic vista unfolding before us. Myth is certainly present in this book in the form of an alluring fable of the woman who marries a snake. The second aspect of Kadare's work is the interpersonal story telling, the sketching of modern characters, and dialog between them. In Spring Flowers, Spring Frost this aspect never coalesces or comes together, and has many more unresolved fragments than we are used to seeing in an Ismail Kadare book.

Not that there isn't huge comedy as the modern world intrudes into Albania in the form of a bank robbery, credit cards, and yes, the Internet. Kadare is a master at introducing technological progress to a society that has avoided technology; he did it to wonderful effect in The File On H which was set in the 1930's period of King Zog. Part of this book's disjointed nature is probably connected to the subject matter. Communism is over, the action of the book is set after 1992, the year Albanians voted the Communist Party out of office for the first time since 1945 and there is a natural anticlimax in the life and times of the country and in the art coming out of the country. With dictator Enver Hoxha dead, there is no longer a monster to go after. Kadare tries valiantly to resurrect the reader's interest by having Ramiz Alia, Hoxha's successor, travel in the middle of the night to a secret archive, and this works for a while as our interest is rekindled, but eventually the ploy becomes a dead end, so that Kadare resuscitates Hoxha himself, and has him meet with Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, but by the time this happens it's a case of too little too late. Perhaps the main value of this effort lies in the threads Kadare establishes that he will develop later in a much more focused and intense book, The Successor.

Not long ago, a Swedish member of the Nobel Prize committee relieved himself of the view that Americans wouldn't be winning the Nobel Prize because they were, well, too American. It's a no-doubt primitive country addicted to pop culture (gasp !) and not given often to publishing the works of those writers admired by the Nobel Prize committee members (like himself). I was glad to read this gentleman's comments because it cleared up a mystery for me. That is, I realized why Ismail Kadare has not won the said prize. He is too Albanian. I fear that does mean that he is in some way compromised; he was unable to avoid history and wound up swallowing a bit too much of the fetid tides of dictatorship for the purist, puerile standards of the (luckier) members of the committee. Every nation, not to say every person, has their own buried, secret archives. They exist in the way water exists on Mars. We know it was there and may still be there, but it's hidden and we are not in a position to do anything about it. We should judge literature and not the behavior of a particular individual stuck in an awful situation.

Tyrants try to wipe out the past in order to become the only focus, the only light in the darkness which spreads from them. When tyrants fall, the buried past returns, seeps up to the surface in unanticipated ways. In the case of Albania, we are talking about the return of the ancient blood feud [see "Broken April", also by Kadare] and its harsh laws after the end of Enver Hoxha and the communist regime. Interspersed with passages of modern banality, of almost European `normality"---sex, love, jobs, and visiting delegations---are hidden icebergs that bob to the surface of life's ocean. The end of Communism didn't mean the beginning of modern life untrammeled. The legend of a girl marrying a snake that was really a man--things are never what they seem, you don't know what lies just beyond in the forest of symbols. Looking for the secret archives of the ancien regime, papers that would reveal all, people dig up mountainsides. We all want to know why those 46 years happened. A totally modern director of the local art center, who has revelled in a trip to Spain, is killed in the inexplicable revival of an old, nearly forgotten family feud. Mark Gurabardhi tries to get down to the essentials of his times pp.145-46 "There was always something missing. And as soon as he tried to get it down on paper, he invariably left out some other trait....Obviously it was the hidden past that gave it all the value." The past is there, a low rumble that suddenly splits the night and transforms the present.

An amazingly insightful, clever novel that never lectures, never becomes didactic. As usual, Kadare operates on several levels. It's all up to you to unravel as much as you can. In the labyrinth of your soul, you may seize upon SFSF as another brilliant book from a great writer. Then again, if you don't like myth and mystery, you may yawn and scratch your head. That's what the Nobel committee seems to be doing.

The old communist regime has fallen after 50 years of tyranny. A new, uncertain Albania is emerging that is mimicking the worst of the free world; bank robbery, fickle fashions, lust for money and delving into a submerged past for social order.
Following the story of Mark,an arts director from the old communist regime and his angst of the brutal past and emerging brutal present.

At first I found this book very esoteric. I could see how it related to Albania and Albanians, but I found little relevence for the wider world; a message for all mankind. (As say Solzenitzens works). It is also heavily laden with imagry which is a bit obvious in its aims.
However, I read it in two sittings and by the end I was quite taken with its messages; man follows all sorts of ideals-most of them murderous-all of them just rehashes of old ideas save in a different order of appearence. Can crime only be prevented in the populace when the state is the biggest criminal of all? Most of what affects our lives is hidden and submerged. I found it quite impressive by the end.

Not an easy to like book. I wish I had read some of his earlier work-perhaps the subtlety would have come accross as more sublime.
Kadare does have something to say.

In Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, the most famous Albanian writer Kadare had to borrow an ancient Albanian folk tale in which a girl marries a snake so he could metaphorically tell us what happens in Albania these days.
A large number of Albanian girls are getting married to unknown Albanian men who live in Italy because there "it's much better" then in Albania but the thing is they don't have any idea that a great deal of them are getting married to forced prostitution once they reach the destination.
Kadare also focused on other issues in present Albania.

Again...very interesting views from the Albanian Kafka.

Kadare sets out two stories, that slowly blur together. Not a traditional historical novel, this story helps explain the dichotomy between new ideas and old traditions in present day Albania.