‘An ancient shadow permeates his work’: Alberto Manguel on the genius of Ismail Kadare
Every morning, for the past few decades, unless he was travelling in his native Albania, Ismail Kadare sat at the same table of Le Rostand cafe overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, and wrote. In the evening he watched the news on Albanian television, and in the morning his wife, Helena, would tell him the latest from Le Monde, but once he reached his table he was no longer in our century but in an ancient past that mirrored contemporary events in the stories of Greece and Rome.
He recalled having read the Greek classics when he was 11, “after which,” he said, “nothing else had any power over my spirit”. This ancient shadow permeated all of Kadare’s work. His plays, short stories, poetry and essays, above all his 36 novels, can be read as a denunciation of absolutist power in the form of retellings of some of our earliest myths. Every war, in Kadare’s reading, echoes the tragedy of Troy; every forced displacement, the plight of Odysseus.
Under the rule of Enver Hoxha that lasted from 1944 until his death in 1985, communist Albania was the scene of arbitrary arrests, state-approved torture and daily executions. In order to continue writing, in 1970, aged 34, Kadare began a short-lived political career as a member of the Albanian communist parliament, which allowed him to travel abroad and to have his books translated. However, after writing a satirical poem about Hoxha’s regime, these privileges were withdrawn, and his manuscripts had to be smuggled into France by his French publisher, Claude Durand. Two decades later, Kadare fled to France where he claimed political asylum.
From then onwards, Kadare’s work was published in Albanian and French simultaneously. In book after book, Kadare chronicled the story of his country, from the ancient days in which early Albanian bards sang songs that are thought to have inspired those of Homer, through successive oppressive regimes – the Romans, the Ottomans, the Italians, the Nazis and the communists. Under Kadare’s unrelenting eye, Albania became a universal stage on which the great tragedies of our legendary past were meticulously played out.
Because of a single novel published in 1977, The Great Winter, that portrayed Hoxha as a benevolent ruler, Kadare was accused of being a collaborator, in spite of the evident anti-totalitarian spirit of all of his work. “That novel was the price I had to pay for my freedom,” he said when was awarded the inaugural Man Booker international prize in 2005. “Would you only be satisfied,” he asked a critic, “if I showed you my fingernails torn out? I chose to give the regime a sop in order to be allowed to continue to write.” In spite of the accusation, Albanians today consider Kadare their foremost writer. After the fall of communism, Kadare was asked by both main Albanian political parties to become a consensual president; he declined, saying that his work was in the realm of words.
In Kadare’s universe, we are all watched over by an all-seeing, all-judging Jehovah-like eye that condemns each of our actions as faulty. As in Kafka’s world, our sins are unnamed; merely the fact of being told that we are guilty forces us to accept punishment in the form of unquestioning subservience and blind obedience. In this unfathomable atmosphere, everything depends on whimsy, and every social value can become negative or positive in a capricious instant. Dictatorships, Kadare argues, breed untruth, selfishness, distrust, fear and irrationality. In the state of our world today, this alone renders Kadare essential reading.
