From May 22, 2008
Alice Fordham talks to the venerable Albanian author about his life under Communist rule
Ismail Kadare wrote for decades under Enver Hoxha's brutal communist regime in Albania, was suspected of spying and threatened with punishment for subversive writing. Despite all this, at 72 he is serene.
Sitting on a cream sofa in his lovely Paris flat, his architectural face and booming, accented French give him his authoritative air. But his confidence is also born of widespread recognition. A winner of the International Man Booker Prize, he is adored in Albania and read across Europe, particularly in France. Now, at last, his work is seeping into the Anglophone consciousness.
Last year, the collection Agamemnon's Daughter was published. The title story took the Greek theme of sacrifice and gave it chilling resonance within a totalitarian regime. Now The Siege, a novel, is published in English, thanks in part to the tireless work of the translator David Bellos.
Written in 1970, it tells of a fictional siege against an Albanian fortress by the Ottoman Army. One - patriotic - interpretation is that Albania is as impregnable as the fortress in the story, but another (given that the Turks did eventually conquer Albania) is that it is only a matter of time before greater forces overpower a smaller one. What is striking, though, are the nuances of the way the Ottoman general controls the army - he sends subversive elements to dig a tunnel, much as Hoxha sent dissidents to mine chromium. And the book seemed a rallying cry to people besieged by the forces of tyranny; even as they are brutalised by the siege, they are hardened against it.
But Kadare disagrees strongly with the idea of the book as a directly dissident work. “This is an almost entirely innocent book in that respect,” he says. “It doesn't claim to or aim to criticise the regime itself.” But despite this, he says, it is subversive in another way: “If you write real literature...normal, authentic literature, then you have already done something that by the fact of being there is against the totalitarian regime.
“Because all totalitarian regimes, especially Stalinist ones, aren't normal, they're mad,” he adds. “So if you manage to do something normal, then you are already against the regime just by the fact of doing it. For me, great literature is just genetically, by its very nature, against totalitarianism. If a book is well done, not to say great or anything - but is a good, proper genuine book, then it is automatically against the totalitarian regime.”
The idea of artistic expression as freedom in itself was obviously tremendously important to Kadare when he wrote the book. “I wrote it in the depths of the totalitarian night,” he says. “And I was very happy when I published it, because it had absolutely nothing to do with the Communist slogans of the day or all the ideological baggage that is part of the culture of Stalinist societies. To be able to write free things in circumstances that are not free is really wonderful.”
He tells me how, in 1981, the son of the Prime Minister, a friend, came to him to tell him that the Government suspected him of spying and that he must be careful. But Kadare's response was to try to forget this, to ignore the authorities and their view of him. Because, he says: “In a country of that kind, the first thing for a writer is the most important one, the most substantial one, it is: do not take the regime seriously.
“You are a writer, you are going to have a much richer life than they have, you are in some sense or another eternal by comparison with those kinds of people, and in the last analysis you don't need to bother about them very much.”
He laughs. “Easy to say,” he says, “but when you're actually there, it's not so easy to do.” He draws a parallel with Dante in the Inferno, when a tempest comes into sight. Virgil, his guide to the underworld, assures him that he need not worry because it is a dead tempest and cannot harm him. “If the writer convinces himself that the tempest is dead,” Kadare says, “the writer is saved.”...
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