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A Kingdom of Bones
| Article
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18527 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
4,466 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is the author of Diminishing Fictions: Essays on
the Modern American Novel and Its Critics (Graywolf Press). He
has three books forthcoming in 1992: Prophets and Professors,
a collection of essays on modern poetry and its critics; The
Screenplay's the Thing, a compilation of pieces about films,
and Coast to Coast, a volume of poetry. |
"Albania's greatest living novelist." For a generation now, the tiny company of critics who concern themselves with Balkan belles lettres have attached this label to Ismail Kadare, and they have done it so consistently that after reading through a few of their brief and scattered commentaries, one pictures the words dangling from Kadare's neck like an infantryman's dogtag. To any literate Anglophone, however, the phrase sounds almost like a contradiction in terms: For if most of us in the West know little about that small, mountainous dominion on the Adriatic, the one thing we do know is that, as far as contemporary culture goes, there's not much worth knowing about it.
Since World War II, no Eastern European country has been more out of touch with the rest of the world, and in none, it would appears, has serious literary expression been more thoroughly inhibited by the severe and stultifying doctrines of socialist realism. Even in the aftermath of the Iron Curtain's collapse, Albania remains the most isolated of European nations, its culture the least familiar to those beyond its borders. What can it mean, then, to be Albania's greatest novelist? What, indeed, is one to make of the career of an immensely gifted author like Kadare, who, far from being subjected to internal exile or imprisonment, has for many years (prior to his recent immigration to France) been treated by his homeland's notoriously oppressive government as a national treasure?
To read Kadare's first novel, The General of the Dead Army (originally published in 1963), is to begin to find one's way toward an answer to these questions. The novel--which tells the story of an unnamed general from an unnamed country (obviously Italy), who, twenty years after the end of World War II, travels to Albania to direct the disinterment and repatriation of the remains of his country's soldiers who dies in the Albanian campaign--has been read by more than one critic as a work of socialist realism. Arshi Pipa, reviewing the French translation (Le general de l'armee morte) in 1972, described it as "a bitter satire against ... militarism and fascism," and characterized the general's assignment as a hypocritical use of "the soldiers' bones to buttress the cause of bourgeois patriotism which serves the interests of those in power." Similarly, Janet Byron, writing in 1979, saw the general as "a symbol of militarism," and suggested that the priest accompanying him is meant to epitomize "the religious support which is accorded Western views"; in her view, the novel draws a contrast between the "life-promoting" qualities of "Albanian character and ... socialist action" and the selfish, morally debilitated ways of the West. That the novel is susceptible to such readings
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