After a gripping opening the Booker international winner's latest mystery rapidly envelops itself in fog, writes James Lasdun
James Lasdun
The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010
The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, winner of the 2005 Man Booker international prize, writes from a position of darkness extreme even by the standards of eastern European literature. Enver Hoxha's rule over Albania was the most benighted of the region's totalitarian regimes. Dissidence was a ticket to the firing squad, complicity was the price of survival, and the moral murk that ensued – in which even the most decent individual was implicated – has been a major source for Kadare's fiction. Out of it he has created Kafkaesque fables, nightmarish historical allegories and his own very distinct kind of mystery.
The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010
The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, winner of the 2005 Man Booker international prize, writes from a position of darkness extreme even by the standards of eastern European literature. Enver Hoxha's rule over Albania was the most benighted of the region's totalitarian regimes. Dissidence was a ticket to the firing squad, complicity was the price of survival, and the moral murk that ensued – in which even the most decent individual was implicated – has been a major source for Kadare's fiction. Out of it he has created Kafkaesque fables, nightmarish historical allegories and his own very distinct kind of mystery.
Conventional crime plots move from confusion to order. Kadare's, however, tend to move in both directions at once, deepening the uncertainty even as they banish it. His last novel, The Successor, was a murder story that managed to fulfil the genre's basic requirement for solutions while at the same time coolly reneging on it by raising even more disturbing questions. The result was a highly unsettling evocation of a society held together by suspicion and terror.
The Accident, also a mystery of sorts, begins promisingly. A man and a woman, both Albanian émigrés in Vienna, are on their way to the airport when their taxi overturns, killing them both. The driver, regaining consciousness a week later, remembers seeing something disturbing in the rear-view mirror but can only dimly articulate what it was. The two passengers, he stammers in confusion, "had done nothing . . . nothing but . . . only . . . they had tried . . . to kiss".
What he means by this curious image, and why the sight of it should have caused him to lose control of the vehicle, he cannot say. Within a few pages we seem to have been brought to the threshhold of something fascinatingly inexpressible.
We learn that the man, Besfort Y, was employed by the Council of Europe as an analyst on Balkan affairs, while his companion, Rovena, was an intern at the Archaeological Institute. For the past 12 years they had been conducting an affair in hotels across central Europe. Their deaths – an accident? A double murder? A suicide pact? – attract the interest of both Serbian and Albanian intelligence, whose investigations turn up all sorts of interesting leads. Besfort may have been implicated in the decision to bomb Serbia and was preparing a secret mission to The Hague which had something to do with war crimes. He had also been in trouble for remarks he made about Israel.
Rovena turns out to be equally enigmatic: slavishly in thrall to Besfort while at the same time punitively rebellious and in the midst of relationships with two other lovers, one of them a woman. The ups and downs of their affair appear to be linked, mysteriously, to the politics of the Balkans.
So far, so good. However, after the secret services abandon their investigations the case is picked up by an "unidentified researcher", who takes the already tenebrous data from which the couple's story has been reconstructed – "dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations" – and supplements it with his own frenzied imaginings of what went on between them.
From here on, as Kadare shifts restlessly between different points of view, lurching back and forth across time ("Thirty-three weeks before. Liza according to Besfort", reads a typical chapter heading), the book envelops itself rather rapidly in deep fog. The real, the surmised, the imagined, even the dreamed begin to blur together, and unless you have a taste for the kind of swirling indeterminacy in which, say, a woman can be shot in one paragraph and continue calmly about her business in the next, the effect is likely to be problematic.
This being Kadare, one doesn't expect some sort of comfortably entertaining Balkan intrigue to develop. To some extent one goes to him precisely for that quality of indeterminacy, which he uses to advance a very singular vision of the intractable murkiness of human affairs.
But even murk requires certain kinds of specificity, and it's this above all that is missing from The Accident. There is no serious attempt to give the characters or settings any interesting presence on the page. Besfort remains an enigma, while the much younger Rovena comes over as a mildly embarrassingly projection of male desire, little more than a pair of breasts that swell and shrink or, puzzlingly, grow "smoother" as the balance of power shifts in their tormented relationship.
Here and there the text brandishes, placard-like, an instructional metaphor on how to read the passengers' doomed affair – it's an allegory of Hoxha and his enslaved populace, or a sadomasochistic rewrite of the Lothario/Anselmo/Camilla love-triangle in Don Quixote, or it's a version of Orpheus and Eurydice – but the sheer variousness of all these feels a bit desperate; and with so little literal detail to latch on to in the characters it's hard to get excited about their larger significance.
Scattered throughout are reminders of Kadare's feverish brilliance – some smouldering vignettes of life in post-Hoxha Albania, for instance, or an amusing moment in a sex club. Meanwhile, the sheer imperviousness of the events in that taxi to rational explanation has something compelling about it. But the abiding impression is of a subject that has never quite come into focus for its author.
James Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.
The Accident, also a mystery of sorts, begins promisingly. A man and a woman, both Albanian émigrés in Vienna, are on their way to the airport when their taxi overturns, killing them both. The driver, regaining consciousness a week later, remembers seeing something disturbing in the rear-view mirror but can only dimly articulate what it was. The two passengers, he stammers in confusion, "had done nothing . . . nothing but . . . only . . . they had tried . . . to kiss".
What he means by this curious image, and why the sight of it should have caused him to lose control of the vehicle, he cannot say. Within a few pages we seem to have been brought to the threshhold of something fascinatingly inexpressible.
We learn that the man, Besfort Y, was employed by the Council of Europe as an analyst on Balkan affairs, while his companion, Rovena, was an intern at the Archaeological Institute. For the past 12 years they had been conducting an affair in hotels across central Europe. Their deaths – an accident? A double murder? A suicide pact? – attract the interest of both Serbian and Albanian intelligence, whose investigations turn up all sorts of interesting leads. Besfort may have been implicated in the decision to bomb Serbia and was preparing a secret mission to The Hague which had something to do with war crimes. He had also been in trouble for remarks he made about Israel.
Rovena turns out to be equally enigmatic: slavishly in thrall to Besfort while at the same time punitively rebellious and in the midst of relationships with two other lovers, one of them a woman. The ups and downs of their affair appear to be linked, mysteriously, to the politics of the Balkans.
So far, so good. However, after the secret services abandon their investigations the case is picked up by an "unidentified researcher", who takes the already tenebrous data from which the couple's story has been reconstructed – "dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations" – and supplements it with his own frenzied imaginings of what went on between them.
From here on, as Kadare shifts restlessly between different points of view, lurching back and forth across time ("Thirty-three weeks before. Liza according to Besfort", reads a typical chapter heading), the book envelops itself rather rapidly in deep fog. The real, the surmised, the imagined, even the dreamed begin to blur together, and unless you have a taste for the kind of swirling indeterminacy in which, say, a woman can be shot in one paragraph and continue calmly about her business in the next, the effect is likely to be problematic.
This being Kadare, one doesn't expect some sort of comfortably entertaining Balkan intrigue to develop. To some extent one goes to him precisely for that quality of indeterminacy, which he uses to advance a very singular vision of the intractable murkiness of human affairs.
But even murk requires certain kinds of specificity, and it's this above all that is missing from The Accident. There is no serious attempt to give the characters or settings any interesting presence on the page. Besfort remains an enigma, while the much younger Rovena comes over as a mildly embarrassingly projection of male desire, little more than a pair of breasts that swell and shrink or, puzzlingly, grow "smoother" as the balance of power shifts in their tormented relationship.
Here and there the text brandishes, placard-like, an instructional metaphor on how to read the passengers' doomed affair – it's an allegory of Hoxha and his enslaved populace, or a sadomasochistic rewrite of the Lothario/Anselmo/Camilla love-triangle in Don Quixote, or it's a version of Orpheus and Eurydice – but the sheer variousness of all these feels a bit desperate; and with so little literal detail to latch on to in the characters it's hard to get excited about their larger significance.
Scattered throughout are reminders of Kadare's feverish brilliance – some smouldering vignettes of life in post-Hoxha Albania, for instance, or an amusing moment in a sex club. Meanwhile, the sheer imperviousness of the events in that taxi to rational explanation has something compelling about it. But the abiding impression is of a subject that has never quite come into focus for its author.
James Lasdun's collection It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.
guardian.co.uk
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου