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An Albanian Nightmare
| Article
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18522 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
2,184 Words |
| Author
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Curtis Cate
Historian and biographer Curtis Cate was greatly aided in the
preparation of this article by Liane Villemont and Jacques
Deschamps of l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel. |
LE PALAIS DES REVES by Ismail Kadare
Translated by Jusuf Vrioni
Paris: Fayard, 1990 236 pp.
If there is one word that applies to the novels of Ismail Kadare, it is atmosphere. To which one might add the adjective epic. Epic atmosphere!
Not for nothing was this famous Albanian author--a versatile poet and playwright as well as novelist--born fifty-four years ago in the town of Gjirokaster (see featured book and commentaries on Kadare, pp 342-89). Gjirokaster, modern descendant of the Argyrokastron of antiquity and a spot some travelers claim to be one of the loveliest old towns in Albania, is barely fifteen miles from the border with Greece. Kadare's novels, even when the setting is modern, are steeped in the epic atmosphere of Greek mythology and drama. A sense of brooding destiny and implacable fate pervades many of his novels, and in one of them, Broken April--which deals with the age-old bessa (the hospitable immunity accorded to any stranger who requests it, to temper the cruel rules of the traditional vendetta)--there is even a suggestion that the mountains of Albania were once the home of the Olympian gods. "That explains why the world of the Rrafsh [the plateau highlands north of Tirane] is half-real, half-imaginary, harking back to the Homeric ages." (And it also explains the creation of demigods like the guests.)
In Le Palais des Reves (The palace of dreams)--the eleventh Kadare novel so far to have been translated into French--this element of implacable fatality might seem more closely linked to the Turkish concept of kismet than to that of the Greek moirai, the goddesses of fate, but this is only because the scene is set in the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century. The capital of the empire, in those days Constantinople, is nowhere specifically described (for this is an allegorical, not a realistic novel), any more than is the sultan, who is occasionally referred to but never actually seen. Yet the dreaded power he wields is as omnipresent as the gloom that, except for one or two springtime "breaks," pervades the novel from beginning to end, an atmosphere subtly suggested by the damp fog veiling the city's streetlamps and the lanterns of passing cabs, in a penumbral haziness worthy of a Whistler canvas.
All of the protagonists in this novel are essentially spectral figures, beginning with the "hero," Mark-Alem--a name carefully chosen to symbolize the almost schizophrenic duality of Albania's historic past, since Alem is
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