”’May I see the book again?’ he asked the investigator.
He opened it with his left hand, because his right hand was shaking. He stared at his own handw”’May I see the book again?’ he asked the investigator.
He opened it with his left hand, because his right hand was shaking. He stared at his own handwriting. The inscription had been written on the first night of his most recent play, in the foyer immediately afterward: For Linda B., a souvenir from the author. June 12th.”
Most authors sign a lot of copies of their books over their lifetime. Rudian Stefa is no exception. The Party Committee has called him in to see if he remembers this girl, this Linda B. Stefa is used to being investigated. His most recent play is up before the Artistic Board over some problems with a ghost in act 2. He has learned to write very carefully to slide what would be considered subversive ideas through the various layers of bureaucratic oversight.
So he thinks he is before The Party for one thing and finds out that he is there for another reason, a very strange reason. He shouldn’t remember the girl, but he does remember the girl, not Linda B., but the girl who brought the book to be signed for Linda B.
Migena.
”The name Migena and the word enigma fluttered through his mind, attempting to come together. They were anagrams. Migena, enigma. To make sure, he wrote the words on the menu, next to the words for expresso coffee. Yes, they really were anagrams. Yes: shuffle the letters of Migena and you got enigma.”
She is gorgeous, and she is interested in him. When he is with her, the pressures of his life seem to explode out of him. When she is away, a bitter anxiety sets in like a dreary, windy, winter’s day. He doesn’t trust her. He can’t ascertain how she sees her role in his life. ”The clumsy thought passed through her mind that her breasts were just as sweet whether she was an informer or not.”
Ismail Kadare talks about the internments imposed on people by the State. ”One of those laws was extremely strange, and many people believed it must be unique to Albania. This law concerned political prisoners and internees who died before completing their sentences. Their bodies, even though vacated by their souls, had to continue serving their sentences in the grave, wherever they happened to be, until the end. Only after the expiry of the term of their sentence did their families have the right to exhume them from the cemeteries designated by the state, and take them wherever they wished.”
That reminds me of situations from Medieval Europe when corpses of enemies of a King were dug up, drawn and quartered, and then hung.
THEY ARE DEAD ALREADY!!!
A sentenced person in Albania has to keep serving his/her sentence even after they are dead? We have several examples in history where a far left communist government becomes so paranoid and so hard hearted as to forget that their own people are living, breathing, adult, human beings, not cattle who need to be herded, or immature children who need to be told how to live every aspect of their life, or that a prison sentence needs to be fulfilled by the corpse of the “perpetrator.” There is an insanity that seems to come with far left or far right political theory. Communism goes so far left and Fascism goes so far right that they start to be indistinguishable from each other. The scale that has them going in opposite directions curves, and they meet up again at the House of Horrors.
This is not one of my favorite Ismail Kadare’s, but that could be because he is just way too smart for me. Maybe I didn’t see a couple of clues, or maybe I just need to be Albanian to decipher the words that are not written but implied. ”The mercilessly crossed-out lines loomed black, and the survivors huddled awkwardly, as if cowering in shame amid the carnage.” In such a short book, Kadare does take on some big subjects: censorship, love/lust, tyranny, and a topic that should be on everyone’s mind, the whys of suicide.
Kadare will take you down a Franz Kafka, hypnagogic hallucination inspired, crooked alley of ghostly delusions if you can read the Albanian street signs.
”The head was establishing its rapport with the crowd. Its glassy eyes sought human eyes. Death hung in the air, transparently visible. As the cold ti”The head was establishing its rapport with the crowd. Its glassy eyes sought human eyes. Death hung in the air, transparently visible. As the cold tightened its grip, the spectators felt drawn closer to the frontier of death, almost touching it. In a few moments the crowd and death would congeal in a waxen, translucent unity.”
Black Ali Pasha of Albania has decided at the age of 82 to rebel against the Sultan in Constantinople. It is not readily clear if he has a death wish or at least that he wants to have a brief moment of perceived freedom before his head is separated from his body.
He knows. The Sultan knows. Everyone knows he won’t win.
The Sultan sends his soldiers to Albania carrying their menacing, black scarecrows, striking terror on the level of stormtroopers or the Waffen-SS
The traitor’s niche in the Cannon Gate awaits Black Ali’s head.
At the Traitor’s Niche, there is a man by the name of Abdulla who is assigned the task of watching over the Niche. He examines the heads twice a day to make sure they are not deteriorating. If anything goes awry with one of the heads, it will be his head. He has recently married and is having trouble…. ”He felt betrayed. His body was slowly failing, about to give up. But the brunt of his anger was directed towards what had previously been his greatest joy: his cock. He could not forgive it. When he was not with his bride, when he was in the street or the cafe or even at the site of his sacred duty, it would unexpectedly swell and be ready for any exploit, but when he was with his wife it became flabby, shrank, and retreated like a puppy faced with a tiger. And so he cursed it for its treachery.”
Before the heads reach Abdulla, they have to be fetched from sometimes the far reaches of the empire. The odious Tundj Hata is the man for that job. It is a nasty assignment which most people would do because they have no choice, but Hata loves it. In fact, you might even say he relishes it. He is pale with a henna stained beard. So what does a man like this dream about as he is riding in a carriage with a snow wrapped head from Albania?
”His brain resembled some clinging creature with the inner luminescence of a glow-worm, whose slime smeared the domes of mosques and mausoleums, banknotes, and the wombs of women awaiting insemination.”
*Shiver*
There is a great emphasis on dreams in the Turkish empire, and soldiers on the march are required to turn in their dreams for analysis so the dream interpreters can sift through their muddled thoughts in search of omens of the near future. The Palace of Dreams back in Constantinople requires dreams from the citizens as well. It sort of reminds me of Roman priests looking at the entrails of a fatted calf to determine if the auguries are favorable.
The empire also has a system to bring a conquered country fully under their control. There are five principal stages:
A physical crushing of the rebellion. The extirpation of any idea of rebellion. The destruction of culture, art, and tradition. The eradication or impoverishment of the language. The extinction or enfeeblement of the national memory.
Ismail Kadare takes us into the minds of Black Ali Pasha, his 22 year old bride, Hurshid Pasha the conqueror of Albania, Abdulla the keeper of the heads, and Tundj Hata the fetcher of the heads, and by doing so gives us a complete picture of a brutal world at the height of Turkish conquest. I remember having a similar experience when I read his book The Siege. I was completely submerged in the minds of the principle characters. This access bloomed the ramifications of the events of the story into a grand epic of images . Kadare writes these thoughtful, stark passages, and every sentence is so finely honed that it makes me wonder how much better it would be in his native Albanian. Another wonderful adventure with Kadare with extra bonus points for a cameo by Lord Byron himself.
”Mark-Alem pressed on, his mouth dry despite his attempts to reassure himself. After all, what did it really matter if he did get lost? He wasn’t on s”Mark-Alem pressed on, his mouth dry despite his attempts to reassure himself. After all, what did it really matter if he did get lost? He wasn’t on some vast plain or in a forest. He was merely inside the Palace. But still the thought of getting lost terrified him. How would he get through the night amid all these walls, these rooms, these cellars full of dreams and wild imaginings? He’d rather be on a frozen plain or in a forest infested with wolves. Yes, a thousand times rather!
He hurried on faster. How long had he been walking now? Suddenly he thought he hear a noise in the distance. Perhaps it’s only an illusion, he told himself. Then, after a little while, the sound of voices burst out again, more clearly this time, though he still couldn’t tell what direction it came from.
He went down another two or three steps and found himself in another corridor, which he deduced must be on the ground floor. The sound of voices faded for a few moments, then returned, nearer...Mark-Alem was practically running by now, his eyes fixed on the end of the corridor, where a faint square of light came in from outside. Please, God. let it be the back door!"
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An empty, seemingly endless hallway can give a person a sense of disassociation.
There are no signs directing people in the proper directions at the Palace of Dreams. Mark-Alem finds himself lost not only in the corridors of the Palace, but also in the hour upon hour day to day work of selecting and interpreting dreams. He is descended from a prominent family called the Quprilis. They have contributed generations of powerful men to the Balkan Empire.
”For nearly four hundred years the Quprilis had seemed fated equally to glory and to misfortune. If its chronicles included great dignitaries, secretaries of state, governors, and prime ministers, they also told how just as many members of the family had been imprisoned or decapitated or had simply vanished.”
There are very few powerful families in the history of humanity that have not found themselves on the losing side of a power struggle at one point or at several points in history. After a few messy decapitations or quarterings these families eventually rise from the ashes (sometimes those ashes are relatives) and find that eventually the state has need of their services again. Now Mark-Alem’s mother is a Quprilis which means it is not evident immediately to the people he meets that he is related to that family. He is timid enough that he does not offer that information readily. Of course when he is summoned to the Palace of Dreams to be offered a position they are very aware of who he is.
He is assured he is the right sort of man.
Instead of starting at the bottom he starts in the middle of the hierarchy.
He moves up so quickly he barely has time to settle into one job before he is sent on to the next one.
Given the nature of the job which is to select dreams and interpret those dreams with the most important ones being sent to the Sultan to help him make decisions about the course of action he will take in running the empire you would think there would be a long and arduous training regime. There is not, at least not for Mark-Alem, but as the plot advances we start to get inklings that he is a pawn in a much bigger, much more dangerous game.
He is absolutely oblivious.
He is paranoid and nervous, but doesn’t know exactly what he should be paranoid and nervous about.
He is too worried about his workload and whether his interpretations of these dreams are correct. He wears out erasures writing what he thinks and then becoming paralyzed with doubt as to how his superiors would interpret his thoughts. Like any good bureaucrat he finds it is much safer to stifle any creativity and pass along the most bland, safest interpretations of the dreams he finds in his folder. Not that they need a reason to separate your head from your body, but certainly try not to hand it to them on a silver platter.
The empire is ruled by dreams. Every dream, no matter how mundane, is required to be written down by every citizen in the realm. I think it only seems reasonable that if I were to have a steamy dream say about my neighbor’s wife that I would make a few changes like say make it two horses in a pasture or really spice it up and have a pig with a goat. My luck somehow that would mean I was secretly plotting the downfall of the empire. These dreams are collected and hauled to the Palace of Dreams where they start the cycle of elimination of those dreams that are deemed worthless or fabricated (mine)and those that are thought to be important are pushed up the chain for further interpretation. As Mark-Alem wanders around his work, usually trying to find a door and usually on the wrong floor to find it, he discovers that sometimes the dreamers are brought in for further questioning about a dream they submitted. The questioning must be rigorous because sometimes those dreamers leave in a black coffin. You're not paranoid if actually there are reasons to be paranoid.
There is no sex in this book, barely a hint of desire. There is one moment where he passes a house where he knows two pretty sisters live and Mark-Alem might have felt a twitch or tingle, but other than that it seems as if the terror of his daily life is all consuming. There is talk at the end of the book of an arranged married, but Mark-Alem is about as interested in the details as he is in catalogued Elephant stool samples.
Ismail Kadare was in Albanian politics during the communist rule in the 1970s. He wrote a satirical poem in 1975 that came to the attention of the government and he was punished by not being able to publish for three years. In 1977 he publishes a book called The Great Winter that is flattering to Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader of Albania. Kadare later said that the book was the price of his freedom. In 1980 when the Palace of Dreams is published the book is immediately banned. Not a big surprise, dictatorships tend to not appreciate books that are Orwellian or Kafkaesque in nature. It seems to me that Kadare was fairly politically astute. He managed to be critical without getting himself killed. It also helps to be Albania’s most celebrated writer. In 1990 he applied for asylum in France.
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Ismail Kadare: dissident against a dictatorship or did he collude to survive? Both I do believe and brilliantly in my opinion.
This book is the English translation of the French translation of the Albanian version. Yeah, I know, scary isn’t it? I don’t read Albanian and I unfortunately do not read French so I have no clue how much this story has been sifted and strained and blended and fluffed. I will say after I got over my initial shock at what the publishers had done to me, (I mean seriously the publisher couldn’t find an Albanian intellectual that has a solid command of English?)I found myself as nervous, paranoid, and as frustrated as Mark-Alem in trying to figure out what really was going on. This book is certainly a blatant condemnation of the Albanian government trying to control everything, granted they couldn’t figure out how to control their subject’s dreams, but if they could have they would. This is must read for those fans of Franz Kafka and George Orwell.
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