Second paragraph of third chapter:

There was no way of knowing why the state of Serbia and Montenegro should take an interest in the accident, but it soon became clear that this country had kept the two victims under surveillance for a long time.

I have generally enjoyed Kadarë's work, but I'm afraid this left me rather unexcited and confused. The story is about an Albanian couple who dies in a freak car accident; we explore what they know about each other, and the woman's other loves; perhaps it's all a metaphor for the international flirtations of post-Communist Albania, but if so it's a bit clumsy and also not all that apt (post-Communist Albania has been pretty firm in its affections). If you want to try it anyway, you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2014 (I could not find Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham, and anyway it turns out that The Accident has overtaken it). Next on that list is Sleepers of Mars, if I can find it, or Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo, if I can't.

I am in Tirana this weekend for a conference, and spent some time in the new Bunk'Art museum, just off Skanderbeg Square in the heart of the city. It's the bunker built for Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu as part of the Interior Ministry in the 1980s – in fact both died before it was finished, and it was never actually used during the Communist period (it is noted that on three occasions post-1990 the government did use it in emergency conditions).

The entrance is oddly sfnal – one commenter made the point that, Tardis-like, it seems bigger on the inside; another spotted the resemblance to a Dalek. Down below, the corridors are as you would expect – bleak concrete. Weird piped music conveying the Hoxhaist aesthetic permeates the atmosphere.

But they have done two things with this bizarre environment. First of all, there is a museum of the history of the Interior ministry occupying the first two corridors. It starts with the relatively benign story of institution-building in a newly independent and fragile state after 1912:

and then goes into the horrors of the Communist period, commemorating more than 5,500 people who were executed by listing some of their names, interviewing survivors of internal exile, forced labour and torture, and delineating the bureaucratic mechanism which enabled this repression to take place. (I had forgotten, incidentally, that Kim Philby was instrumental in transmitting information to Tirana via Moscow destroying the anti-Communist resistance in the late 1940s.)

Even so, thousands were able to flee Albania for other countries, and the collapse of the regime was triggered by a mass movement to refuge in Western embassies in July 1990.

A little more light-heartedly, the museum looks at the techniques of surveillance (which I found very evocative of Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams):

And also the famous instruction to visitors to respect socialist aesthetics in their hairstyle and clothing, complete with pictures of visitors being shaved at the border.

The culmination of the museum part of the installation is the Ministerial underground office, with time-appropriate phones and decorated with pictures of former Interior Ministers.

The other part of the installation is an art and performance space, in the deepest part of the bunker. Some parts of the architecture have been co-opted as art:

Other rooms contain exhibits.

(That “pickaxe in one hand and rifle in the other” line seems familiar.)

It’s an extraordinary place. I had the pleasure of the company of a prominent scientist, who like me had been to Tirana several times before but had not had the chance to visit Bunk’Art since it opened late last year.

What struck me was that unlike the Berlin “Topography of Terror” exhibition, this demonstrates how the normal mechanisms of establishing the structures of the Albanian state after independence in 1912 – the gendarmerie, the border guards, the fire and rescue services – were rapidly co-opted and brutally used to maintain the life of the Hoxha regime. Yet the bunker itself, built at great expense, was never used by its creators; by the time it was finished, oppression was on the way out, and its destiny turns out to be an exposure of secrets that the former rulers would have never wanted revealed, and a place for the performance of art that they would certainly have found degenerate. It’s a reminder that it may take a long time, but evil government does contain the seeds of its own downfall.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As he went along the corridor he was assailed by all sorts of doubts and surmises. Could he have made some mistake in his work? Could someone have appeared from the depths of the Empire and come knocking at every door, going from office to office and vizier to vizier, claiming that his valuable dream had been thrown in the wastepaper-basket? Mark-Alem tried to remember the dreams he'd rejected recently, but couldn't recall any of them. Perhaps that wasn't it, though. Perhaps he'd been summoned because of something else. It was nearly always like that: when you were sent for, it was almost invariably for some reason you could never have dreamed of. Was it something to do with breaking the secrecy rule? But he hadn't seen any of his friends since he'd started working here. As he asked his way through the corridors he felt more and more strongly that he'd been in this part of the Palace before. He thought for a while this might be because all the corridors were identical, but when he finally found himself in the room with the brazier, where the square-faced man sat with his eyes glued to the door, he realised it had been the Director-General's office he had knocked on his very first day in the Tabur Sarrail. He'd been so absorbed in his work since then that he'd forgotten it even existed, and even now he had no idea what the square-faced man's job was in the Palace of Dreams. Was he one of the many assistant directors, or the Director-General himself?

This was the novel that got Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, into trouble with the Communist authorities when it was written and sneakily published in 1980 and 1981. Our protagonist, Mark-Alem of the ancient Quprili family, is recruited to the Palace of Dreams in the capital of the Empire, where feuding bureaucrats together analyse and report on the portents opened up to the Imperial rulers through the dreams of the populace. You don't have to be very smart to see this as a rather clear analogy of the Sigurimi under the Hoxha regime, gathering information neurotically and monitoring the loyalty of the population closely, yet also vulnerable at the top to the whims of the man at the very centre of the state.

The Writers' Plenum which condemned the book showed only that they could not appreciate the talent they had amongst them. As well as being rather like a Kafka story told by an insider, Kadare adopts a lot of Latin American-style magical realism in the story (there is a particularly bizarre and vivid police raid on a dinner party). My linguistic instincts are sharp enough also to spot that there is something going on with the protagonist’s name: Qubrili, we are told, is linked with the word for “bridge”, in modern Turkish “köprü”; but of course the standard Albania word for bridge these days is “urë”, and what it anyway made me think of was the novel by Ivo Andrić of the old Yugoslavia, Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge on the Drina (the modern word is “most” rather than “ćuprija”). It would be interesting for someone to do an annotated edition of this some time.

Edited to add: I was over-analysing here. The Albanian Köprülü / Qubrili family were indeed a perfectly real powerful political family in the Ottoman empire, so there is no explicit reference by Kadare to Andrić.

This was the most popular book on my shelves acquired in 2010. Next in that ranking is a Dutch translation of an Italian children's book, De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, supposedly by the heroic mouse protagonist Geronimo Stilton, which has already popped up this month.

See note on methodology

Albanian literature is dominated by a single writer, born in 1936 and still living. Seven of the eight books most frequently tagged “Albania” on Goodreads are by him, and nine of the top ten on LibraryThing. I’ve read half a dozen of his works, and enjoyed them all very much. The two top books on both LT and GR are:

Broken April / Prilli i Thyer, by Ismail Kadare (top on GR, second on LT)
The Palace of Dreams / Pallati i Enderrave, by Ismail Kadare (top on LT, second on GR

However, I’m sorry to say that neither of them is today’s winner. Despite their excellence as literature, both have been well outsold by a mildly funny Cold War thriller, published and set in 1966, about a grandmother who is recruited by the CIA to go undercover in Mexico and ends up imprisoned in Albania. It is the first of a series of 14 novels (I wonder how they would hold up to the passage of time) and has been filmed twice, once starring Rosalind Russell (in her last role) and one with (of course) Angela Lansbury. It is:

The Unexpected Mrs Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

Apart from that, though, it’s I.K. all the way.

Kadarë’s classic account of growing up in his home city of Gjirokastër during the second world war. I’ve never been there though a friend of mine is one of the local MPs, a minister in the outgoing Albanian government. Another local, nameschecked here as “Enver, the Hoxha boy”, ended up running the country for four decades until his death in 1985.

Reading it so soon after Survival in Auschwitz made for an interesting contrast: Kadarë depicts an ancient society unwillingly dragged into modernity by the occupying Italians, Greeks and Germans, and by the British bombs dropped on the city. Our narrator tries to make sens of all this, by reading Macbeth and observing the weirdnesses of his neighbours and relatives.

The partisans are portrayed in a way as a brutal internal response – I am surprised that Kadarë got away with showing them as he did, in 1971; Hoxha’s Albania was obviously very different from North Korea. And the war also terminates human relationships – directly, through death, and indirectly, through the destruction of the old customs of courtship and marriage – one of the most memorable characters is Kako Pino, who makes up the brides of Gjirokastër on their wedding days.

The truth is sometimes a bit difficult to pin down, and so is the exact text: the cover of the book says that the translation is by David Bellos, but Bellos in a very good introduction explains that the translation is mostly by Albanian dissident Arshi Pipa, who fell out with the original publisher and demanded that his name be removed. Bellos doesn’t make it entirely clear if the English text here actually corresponds to any Albanian version of Kronikë në gur. For all that, it’s Kadarë’s least weird novel, of those that I have read, and perhaps his most approachable.

15) The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva, by Arthur Kavanagh

My latest little project is to read up on the fascinating Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, whose life story combines my interests in Irish history and disability. I have ordered all three available biographies second hand, but was delighted to discover that the one book which he himself actually wrote is available in its entirety, complete with colour prints based on photographs which he took, online via Google Books.

The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva is a travelogue of a shooting cruise which lasted just under six months, from October 1862 to April 1863, taking Kavanagh and his wife and friends to Corfu and the surrounding coastline. (No mention is made of Kavanagh’s children, though we know from other sources that at least two and probably four had been born since his marriage in 1855. Presumably they were left behind in Ireland.) It was an interesting time to visit politically; King Otho of Greece had just been overthrown, and the British government had promised to hand over Corfu (and the other Ionian Islands, under British rule since 1815) to the new Greek king, George of Denmark. Kavanagh was there in the last few months of the British presence, and makes it clear that he deeply regrets the decision:

I do not mean to say that either tact or civility would have made the Ionian race satisfied with their position, not at all. Proud, restless, querulous, and variable as the wind, the most that could be said is, that they might have been more dissatisfied under any other protectorate, and about the worst that can be wished them is that they may be left to govern themselves. As they now stand, they have a long list of vexatious, trivial grievances, to place in the scale against great and substantial advantages. When they grumble at their taxes do they consider the millions of English money that have been spent, and are daily in course of being spent, in and upon their island. When the English are gone, what will their market be?

One senses that he may have had some other, larger British-ruled island in mind apart from Corfu.

But excursions into politics are rare (having said which, Kavanagh got elected MP for Wexford only a couple of years later). Mostly the book is about the technicalities of crewing a yacht from Ireland to Albania, and then shooting lots and lots of animals when they got there. (The final death toll, proudly printed on the last page, is “Pigs 10; Snipe 45; Deer 6; Plover 6; Jackalls [sic] 6; Pigeons 24; Hares 4; Swan 1; Geese 13; Bittern 1; Duck 54; Sea Pheasant 7;  Widgeon 152; Bargander [?] 3; Teal 102; Grebe Duck 4; Woodcock 203.”) Lots of discussion of the locals and their quaint habits, and of the ecology of the shoreline. They ranged quite a long way both north and south, but Corfu was their base.

Kavanagh was only in his early 30s at this point, but had already had an adventurous life, which he occasionally reminisces about. I found this passage about his famous trip of ten years previously particularly interesting for its echoes of Hopkirk’s The Great Game:

We started by Norway to make our way overland to India, went through Norway, Sweden, into Russia, through its immense extent to the Caspian Sea, visiting the great fair of Nizni Novogorod. We made our way across the Caspian from Astrachan to Asterabad and were caged for a day in the latter town in a sort of wooden structure, in the middle of the only square, and pelted diligently by the hospitable inhabitants with rotten eggs and bad oranges, soft things no doubt,but not the less trying to the temper. Thence we went from the north to the south of Persia, intersecting Kourdistan and Louristan, in the former of which lively spots I found poor Conolly’s prayer book, and was shewn by an interesting Kourd the very tree to which he and poor Studdert [sic] were tied and foully murdered, the Kourd said because they would not become Mussulmen: we had no intention of being turncoats either, but I expect we owed our whole skin to our poverty, possessing little more than our rifles, horses, and a change of clothes, one shirt off, and another shirt on ; I don’t mean to say, fair reader, that these were all we started with, but, certainly, they were all we had left, and the Kourds may have reasoned that it was hardly worth risking three of their precious lives in exchange for ours, the value of our possessions included.

The thought of Kavanagh, with his disabilities, being put on public display like that is pretty revolting. But I am very intrigued by the mention of Conolly and Stoddard’s fate, and Conolly’s prayer book – most accounts have the two meeting their doom in Bukhara, 1000 km to the east, and Conolly’s prayer book, now in the National Archives, was supposedly presented to his widow by a Russian who picked it up in Bukhara many years later. Also Asterabad (now Gorgan) is in northern Iran and does not appear to have been part of the Khanate of Khiva, let alone under Bukhara. Kavanagh knew how to tell a good traveller’s tale.

The striking thing about the whole book is that Kavanagh was sufficiently confident in his personal security to go wandering around the frontier between a fading Ottoman empire, an evacuating British protectorate, and a Greek kingdom recovering from revolution, with his wife and various retainers. The worst hassle he reports experiencing is when he is taking photographs of the local women, and has to get their husbands to stop them raiding his darkroom materials. Perhaps there are bits of the story he didn’t tell. (He himself starts and finishes with the yacht; his wife and the other women come to the Mediterranean by train and commercial steamer.)

And there is no mention at any point of his disabilities. (The closest we get, perhaps, is in the incident of the women and the photographic stuff, where it is clear that he is unable himself to take physical measures to stop them.) As a narrative on its own merits, The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva is not especially remarkable; but in context it is extraordinary.

26) The Successor, by Ismail Kadarë

A short but really gripping novel exploring the death of the designated Successor to Albania’s Communist ruler (referred to as the Guide); did he shoot himself, or was he murdered? The event referred to is clearly the mysterious death of Mehmet Shehu in December 1981, though Kadarë has changed or invented a lot of the details – it was Shehu’s son, not his daughter, who had entered a politically unwise engagement; the date of death was the 17th not the 14th; the party session at which he was denounced was the previous month not the previous day. This is beside the point anyway; Kadarë’s point is about the damage the regime did to itself and to its people, and he tells the story from several points of view, including the foreign intelligence analysts trying to understand what had happened, the Successor’s daughter (a particularly good passage), the architect who designed his building, and the interior minister suspected of the crime, if crime there was. There is also a fantasy element, of ghosts and mediums, which adds to the sense of layers of reality. A fascinating book.

7) The File on H, by Ismail Kadarë

I’ve read a few Kadarë books – most recently, The General of the Dead Army – and happened to see this one at Vienna Airport on my way through to Moldova on Thursday. It is short but very deep: the tale of two ethnographers visiting Albania in the 1930s during the rule of King Zog, to record ancient epic poetry (the H in the title stands for Homer). The two ethnographers are supposed to be Irish, but might as well be Japanese for the purposes of the story: the novel is about Albania, not about Ireland. (Perhaps it was in part a response to Andrić’s foreigners encountering Bosnia in The Days of the Consuls?)

But it’s also about the construction of truth, how stories are told, especially when the state tries to regulate knowledge and information. Although the patriotic version of Albanian history – 1878, 1913 – is the only one told here, one senses that Kadarë himself doesn’t completely buy it, and subverts it in the way he tells the story. In the meantime people escape as best they can, the rather ethereal epic poetry souight by the Irishmen in contrast with the erotic dreams of the governor’s wife. A really good book, strongly recommended.

1) A Game Of You, by Neil Gaiman (Sandman Vol 5) – excellent. I am beginning to wonder, though, whether I should go back and read it all again from the beginning now, or wait until I have bought one or two more?

2) The Myth of Greater Albania, by Paulin Kola – Not a bad historical account of Albania’s policies towards Kosovo in the twentieth century. It hadn’t struck me before that both King Zog and Enver Hoxha were basically installed as rulers of Albania through force of arms with Serbian help, and though both went through their ups and downs with Belgrade subsequently, neither ever really challenged the 1912 borders. Unnervingly the book switches to the first person for one particular diplomatic episode where the author was (at least by his own account) the main player.

I raised this with an Albanian diplomat at a reception we were both at last night. He teased me by asking when I would next visit Albania. I told him I hadn’t been to Albania for over 36 years. He asked how I could write about Albania without having ever been there. I replied, “The last thing I wrote about Albania was the story of how you didn’t become President.” We clinked our wine glasses together.