Books of The Times
Power Struggles and Riddles, in Romance and Political Intrigue
By _CHARLES McGRATH_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/charles_mcgrath/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: November 23, 2010
The name of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare regularly comes up at Nobel
Prize time, and he is still a good bet to win it one of these days. He
writes in a language that is not English. He comes from a country that most of
us know next to nothing about, where he was oppressed not just by a
run-of-the-mill totalitarian but by the bizarre and paranoid Enver Hoxha. He is
fluent in the styles of modernism and postmodernism both. And, an
unlooked-for bonus, he is seemingly incapable of writing a book that fails to be
interesting.
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J. Foley/Opale
Ismail Kadare
THE ACCIDENT
By Ismail Kadare
Translated by John Hodgson
265 pages. Grove Press. $24.
His new novel, “The Accident,” is not one of his major achievements, and
readers looking for Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) at the top of his
form should probably start with “Chronicle in Stone,” which came out in
English in 1987, or _“The Three-Arched Bridge,”_
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/reviews/970302.02mcgratt.html?_r=1) from 1997. But “The Accident,
” fluidly translated by John Hodgson, is provocative nonetheless, not
least because of the way it starts out as one kind of book and turns into
something else entirely. This, you feel, is how _Mr. Kadare_
(http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/31/garden/at-lunch-with-ismail-kadare-a-meeting-of-the-venerated-
and-best-known.html) sees the world: as a place always shifting and
remaking itself.
“The Accident” begins like a thriller, or an update of an _Alan Furst
novel._ (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/books/17book.html) A taxi flips over
on a Viennese autobahn, ejecting its two passengers through the back
doors. By the time help arrives, they’re both dead. The driver, apparently
traumatized, can’t account for what happened except to say that he chanced to
look in the rearview mirror and saw the passengers, a man and a woman, “
trying to kiss.”
The victims, it turns out, were Albanians and longtime lovers: Besfort Y.,
an analyst working for the Council of Europe on Balkan affairs, and Rovena
St., an intern at the Archaeological Institute of Vienna. Because Besfort
may have been involved in the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Balkan War,
the Serbian government begins to investigate, and pretty soon the Albanian
secret service does too. Could the accident have been a political murder? A
double suicide?
When these inquiries fail to turn up anything substantial, a character
called the researcher — a stand-in for the novelist — takes over and begins
obsessively trying to put together the pieces. He pores over the evidence,
such as it is — “dark surmises, grave suspicions, ambiguous phrases, obscure
scraps of dialogue drawn from half-remembered phone conversations” — and
he also gives vent to his own imaginings. His account of the couple’s
relationship, which consists mostly of meetings in four-star hotel bedrooms,
jumps back and forth in time and alternates between Besfort’s point of view
and Rovena’s.
Seen one way, their story seems to be that of a fairly ordinary,
hot-and-cold relationship, intensified, perhaps, by Balkan politics and by the long
periods they spend apart, brooding. The bitterness of their quarrels is
often redeemed by the sweetness of their reconciliations; actually breaking up,
though they talk about it a lot, appears to be out of the question. They
may not be in love, exactly, but they’re not done with each other.
There is also a kinky side, though. The researcher creepily records — or
imagines — the way Rovena’s breasts swell and shrink, depending on how the
relationship is going, and describes in soft-porn detail the couple’s visit
to an Albanian swingers’ club. Or maybe the researcher is getting off on
making all this up. We never know for sure. We do know that Besfort
encourages Rovena to take other lovers, or at least tolerates them, and then
consumes himself with jealousy and treats her like a call girl. And inevitably
struggles in the relationship take on the dimensions of a political power
struggle. The researcher suggests in a few places that the whole story can be
read as an allegory of the Hoxha regime, with first Rovena and then Besfort
in the role of the tyrant.
“I’m abdicating,” Besfort says. “Nobody will ever topple me.”
Rovena responds: “Do what you want, take power or reject it. There is no
way I can escape from you.”
In the end the researcher’s frustration — the impossibility of knowing
anything for certain — drives him over the edge, and he takes the novel with
him, entertaining wilder and wilder speculations before coming up with a
solution. Maybe one or the other passenger in the back seat was a simulacrum?
Maybe simulacra are more real than what they represent? Maybe the clue to
what happened is preserved, like a riddle from “Through the Looking-Glass,”
within the rearview mirror itself and will be revealed a thousand years
from now?
What gets left behind in all this metaphysical guesswork is Rovena and
Besfort, who instead of developing and becoming more interesting as the book
goes on, are, if anything, pared down and reduced. They become so unknowable
they’re barely characters at all. Presumably this is deliberate on Mr.
Kadare’s part, but it means that the reader has to give up some of the
traditional pleasures of the novel — the illusion of getting to know
flesh-and-blood people — for the more head-spinning sensation of looking at them through
a fun-house mirror. For all we know, this is really what it felt like in
Hoxha’s Albania, and “The Accident” may be less a parable than a kind of
topsy-turvy realism. In either case, it takes you to the sort of place novels
don’t routinely visit these days, and also leaves you grateful you don’t
have to dwell there.
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