“Agamemnon’s Daughter” is negligible. But Kadare is a great writer, and “The Blinding Order” in particular is not to be...
A miscellany showcasing earlier work by the Albanian author (Elegy for Kosovo, 2000, etc.) and recipient of the first Man Booker International Prize.
Unfortunately, Kadare’s considerable gifts are absent from the title novella, a precursor to his 2003 novel The Successor. Its unnamed narrator, a journalist for the nation’s Broadcast Services, weighs his unexpected special invitation to the annual May Day Parade (a perk reserved for Socialist Party faithful) against his lover Suzana’s announcement that her father’s sensitive position—as chosen successor to Albania’s moribund dictator—obliges her to end their relationship. Nothing happens, literally, as the narrator ruefully compares Suzana’s decision to Greek king Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, intended to placate gods directing the Trojan War’s outcome; tries to distinguish his own situation from those of friends and acquaintances who have compromised and betrayed in order to ensure their political survival; and clearly foresees the fate awaiting him. This turgid, redundant semi-fiction is far less interesting than the stories that accompany it. “The Great Wall” (1993) presents a plan to repair the Chinese landmark from the (oddly similar) viewpoints of a Chinese official and a barbarian member of the invading army of “Timur the Lame” (aka Tamurlane). It’s a wry Borgesian explication of the complementary permutations of conquest and survival. Even better is “The Blinding Order” (1984), set in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, when a sultan’s decree sentences “carriers” of “the evil eye” to be blinded. This brilliant metaphor (and premise) speaks volumes about the brutality and illogic of paranoid regimes (and is, incidentally, linked through its main subplot to Kadare’s fine 1981 novel The Palace of Dreams). Superbly plotted, charged with bitter black humor, it’s a masterly parable worthy of comparison with José Saramago’s Nobel-anointed fiction.
“Agamemnon’s Daughter” is negligible. But Kadare is a great writer, and “The Blinding Order” in particular is not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-55970-788-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
IN THE NEWS
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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