lupo-de-mare
Gesperrt
Ismail Kadare der berühmte Albanische Schriftsteller, hat viele Bücher über die Albanischen Mythen und Geschichtliche Vorgänge geschrieben.
Sein neues Buch: THE SUCCESSOR By Ismail Kadare
behandelt u.a. den mysteriösen Tod von Mehmet Shehu, dem Albanischen Ministerpräsidenten 1981, direkt am Kabinetts Tisch der Albanischen Regierung. Der Artikel erschienn in der New York Times
In a Shadowy Nightmare, Fear Is a Dead Certainty
By RICHARD EDER
http://query.nytimes.com/search/que...te&sort=newest&ac=RICHARD EDER&inline=nyt-per ,
November 26, 2005
I
n 1981 Mehmet Shehu, long the presumed successor to Albania's terrifying
dictator Enver Hoxha, was found dead. Suicide was the official verdict,
but in that least known and most isolated Balkan nation the real verdict
was death by mystery. If suicide, why? Or if murder, again why, and by whom?
Sophie Bassouls/Sygma
THE SUCCESSOR By Ismail Kadare
207 pages. Arcade Publishing. $24.
It is a story uncannily suited to the nightmare universe the Albanian
writer Ismail Kadare has created over so many years that it is almost as
if his writing had made it happen. Mr. Kadare carries mystery past
itself into a morass where the whys and whoms become irrelevant, and
time runs sporadically backward as well as forward.
Among the great writers of modern times, and Mr. Kadare is one of them
(he is the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize, set up
this year to honor literature outside the English-speaking world), only
Kafka has explored such territory so disturbingly. Each uses an errant
tenderness, a somber gaiety, to etch the chill; yet there is a principal
difference between them.
Kafka's allegories treat an abstract world that lets us recognize
(without entirely sinking into) the helplessness with which we inhabit
our own. The Castle is nowhere in particular; Gregor Samsa's buggy
metamorphosis occurs in a bed that could be anywhere (well, anywhere in
prewar Central Europe). The existential, universal tyranny that imposes
such helplessness has no particular face or place.
Mr. Kadare's disabling tyrannies, equally universal, are darkly and
deeply embedded. "The Palace of Dreams" is set in a medieval Ottoman
empire whose subjects' dreams are recorded and watched. "The Pyramid"
takes place in ancient Egypt. There, upon a mere rumor that the Pharaoh
Cheops intends to sacrifice tens of thousands of his subjects' lives for
his monstrous enterprise, cartloads of whips come trundling in from the
manufacturers. They know that royal rumors always end with a need for whips.
In "The Successor," the death of the Shehu character is introduced as a
rumor that offers an equivalent terror. Not the fact of the death but
what the figure called the Guide - based upon the all-powerful Hoxha -
will proclaim it to be. Until he does, and until he decides to call it
murder and further decides whom he will name as murderer, fear hangs
over the land.
It is primal fear, not of the known, which is sufficient for
administering any run-of-the-mill despotism, but Mr. Kadare's particular
vision of the despotic: fear of the dreamlike unknown. Far from
estranging, it imposes a baleful intimacy; it is not a window onto hell
but a mirror held up within it.
Everything is told uncertainly. The story and its characters change
shapes. An event does not follow a cause or cause a succeeding event to
take place; it is born from a whisper, a cloud, an unconscious gathering
of other unknown and unknowable events. It is not, as physicists would
put it, a particle but a wave.
Different theories are put about. The Successor is said to have
transgressed by favoring liberalization, but this is plainly absurd. He
was the hardest of hard-liners; the Guide sometimes used his
intransigence so as to appear moderate. Or perhaps he offended because
his daughter was engaged to the scion of a formerly upper-class family.
But the Guide came to the engagement party, congratulated the couple,
embraced the father.
And, a Kadare touch, he seemed fascinated by a dimmer that controlled
the lights. He brought them up high, then slowly lowered them. The room,
the city, the country and the whole story darken.
Time is bent. Party members are summoned to fill the city's 14 principal
halls. Onstage, tape recorders play a speech given the previous day by
the Guide welcoming his dear colleague back to the Party's good graces;
by this time the Successor is dead, his body discovered the previous night.
Reports circulate of a procession of official cars arriving and
departing the same night from his residence. A figure resembling
Hasobeu, the police minister, was seen entering and leaving soon
afterward. Through a window two men were glimpsed carrying the Successor
- or his corpse - down a staircase.
An autopsy is ordered; the pathologist is filled with dread. Nothing is
more dangerous than handling the bodies of the prominent. As the Guide
over the years repeatedly switched policies (Albania broke off with
Yugoslavia when Tito turned against Stalin, remained Stalinist after
Stalin's death, broke with the Soviet Union, allied itself with China
and broke with China), the Guide's political associates were selectively
and successively purged, shot, buried, rehabilitated, dug up and
reburied in a disgrace resumed.
The city's most distinguished architect confesses to his wife that he
was the cause of the Successor's death. He had remodeled his mansion
with a refined taste that put to shame the Guide's blockish palace next
door. Mr. Kadare, who has lived in France since the mid-1980's (having
managed until then to write if not always publish in Albania), inserts
the story of a French monarch who revenged himself upon a courtier whose
palace outshone his own.
There is word of a secret tunnel that connects the Successor's residence
with the Guide's and can be opened and locked only from the Guide's
side. There is a scene in which the Guide seems to instruct Hasobeu to
take care somehow of the difficulties with the Successor. We see Hasobeu
with a pistol, assume he's done the deed, then learn he couldn't have
gained entrance - even though we had read earlier that he was in fact
seen entering.
Gradually we learn that the death was ordered by the Guide, although the
perpetrator, shockingly hinted at, was not Hasobeu. But doubt is
everywhere else. The Guide tells his secretary that he doesn't know what
happened.
This is not dissembling. It is a kind of truth; the truth that inheres
in the writer's extraordinary portrait of tyranny. By day, knowledge is
power; unknowing is the supreme power of the night.
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0511e&L=albanews&T=0&F=&S=&P=78
Sein neues Buch: THE SUCCESSOR By Ismail Kadare
behandelt u.a. den mysteriösen Tod von Mehmet Shehu, dem Albanischen Ministerpräsidenten 1981, direkt am Kabinetts Tisch der Albanischen Regierung. Der Artikel erschienn in der New York Times
In a Shadowy Nightmare, Fear Is a Dead Certainty
By RICHARD EDER
http://query.nytimes.com/search/que...te&sort=newest&ac=RICHARD EDER&inline=nyt-per ,
November 26, 2005
I
n 1981 Mehmet Shehu, long the presumed successor to Albania's terrifying
dictator Enver Hoxha, was found dead. Suicide was the official verdict,
but in that least known and most isolated Balkan nation the real verdict
was death by mystery. If suicide, why? Or if murder, again why, and by whom?
Sophie Bassouls/Sygma
THE SUCCESSOR By Ismail Kadare
207 pages. Arcade Publishing. $24.
It is a story uncannily suited to the nightmare universe the Albanian
writer Ismail Kadare has created over so many years that it is almost as
if his writing had made it happen. Mr. Kadare carries mystery past
itself into a morass where the whys and whoms become irrelevant, and
time runs sporadically backward as well as forward.
Among the great writers of modern times, and Mr. Kadare is one of them
(he is the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize, set up
this year to honor literature outside the English-speaking world), only
Kafka has explored such territory so disturbingly. Each uses an errant
tenderness, a somber gaiety, to etch the chill; yet there is a principal
difference between them.
Kafka's allegories treat an abstract world that lets us recognize
(without entirely sinking into) the helplessness with which we inhabit
our own. The Castle is nowhere in particular; Gregor Samsa's buggy
metamorphosis occurs in a bed that could be anywhere (well, anywhere in
prewar Central Europe). The existential, universal tyranny that imposes
such helplessness has no particular face or place.
Mr. Kadare's disabling tyrannies, equally universal, are darkly and
deeply embedded. "The Palace of Dreams" is set in a medieval Ottoman
empire whose subjects' dreams are recorded and watched. "The Pyramid"
takes place in ancient Egypt. There, upon a mere rumor that the Pharaoh
Cheops intends to sacrifice tens of thousands of his subjects' lives for
his monstrous enterprise, cartloads of whips come trundling in from the
manufacturers. They know that royal rumors always end with a need for whips.
In "The Successor," the death of the Shehu character is introduced as a
rumor that offers an equivalent terror. Not the fact of the death but
what the figure called the Guide - based upon the all-powerful Hoxha -
will proclaim it to be. Until he does, and until he decides to call it
murder and further decides whom he will name as murderer, fear hangs
over the land.
It is primal fear, not of the known, which is sufficient for
administering any run-of-the-mill despotism, but Mr. Kadare's particular
vision of the despotic: fear of the dreamlike unknown. Far from
estranging, it imposes a baleful intimacy; it is not a window onto hell
but a mirror held up within it.
Everything is told uncertainly. The story and its characters change
shapes. An event does not follow a cause or cause a succeeding event to
take place; it is born from a whisper, a cloud, an unconscious gathering
of other unknown and unknowable events. It is not, as physicists would
put it, a particle but a wave.
Different theories are put about. The Successor is said to have
transgressed by favoring liberalization, but this is plainly absurd. He
was the hardest of hard-liners; the Guide sometimes used his
intransigence so as to appear moderate. Or perhaps he offended because
his daughter was engaged to the scion of a formerly upper-class family.
But the Guide came to the engagement party, congratulated the couple,
embraced the father.
And, a Kadare touch, he seemed fascinated by a dimmer that controlled
the lights. He brought them up high, then slowly lowered them. The room,
the city, the country and the whole story darken.
Time is bent. Party members are summoned to fill the city's 14 principal
halls. Onstage, tape recorders play a speech given the previous day by
the Guide welcoming his dear colleague back to the Party's good graces;
by this time the Successor is dead, his body discovered the previous night.
Reports circulate of a procession of official cars arriving and
departing the same night from his residence. A figure resembling
Hasobeu, the police minister, was seen entering and leaving soon
afterward. Through a window two men were glimpsed carrying the Successor
- or his corpse - down a staircase.
An autopsy is ordered; the pathologist is filled with dread. Nothing is
more dangerous than handling the bodies of the prominent. As the Guide
over the years repeatedly switched policies (Albania broke off with
Yugoslavia when Tito turned against Stalin, remained Stalinist after
Stalin's death, broke with the Soviet Union, allied itself with China
and broke with China), the Guide's political associates were selectively
and successively purged, shot, buried, rehabilitated, dug up and
reburied in a disgrace resumed.
The city's most distinguished architect confesses to his wife that he
was the cause of the Successor's death. He had remodeled his mansion
with a refined taste that put to shame the Guide's blockish palace next
door. Mr. Kadare, who has lived in France since the mid-1980's (having
managed until then to write if not always publish in Albania), inserts
the story of a French monarch who revenged himself upon a courtier whose
palace outshone his own.
There is word of a secret tunnel that connects the Successor's residence
with the Guide's and can be opened and locked only from the Guide's
side. There is a scene in which the Guide seems to instruct Hasobeu to
take care somehow of the difficulties with the Successor. We see Hasobeu
with a pistol, assume he's done the deed, then learn he couldn't have
gained entrance - even though we had read earlier that he was in fact
seen entering.
Gradually we learn that the death was ordered by the Guide, although the
perpetrator, shockingly hinted at, was not Hasobeu. But doubt is
everywhere else. The Guide tells his secretary that he doesn't know what
happened.
This is not dissembling. It is a kind of truth; the truth that inheres
in the writer's extraordinary portrait of tyranny. By day, knowledge is
power; unknowing is the supreme power of the night.
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0511e&L=albanews&T=0&F=&S=&P=78