KEY POINTS:
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian who began writing fiction when his country was ruled by the mad, Stalinist regime under Enver Hoxha that became the shame of Europe by the time the dictator died in 1985.
Manuscripts smuggled out earned Kadare a literary reputation, which built steadily
as translations became available in Europe, and culminated in his winning the Man Booker International Prize in 2005.
Agamemnon's Daughter is the story of a young man having an affair with the daughter of one of the country's leaders. At the same time as he receives an unexpected invitation to an auspicious seat for a national parade, his lover rejects him, seemingly for political reasons.
As he makes his way through increasingly thorough security checks to his seat in the stadium, the story illuminates the capricious insane and, in a way, inane conditions that prevail in these cult-of-personality regimes. He worries whether others will assume he has done the regime a favour, perhaps by condemning one of his associates, and this arms him with a kind of dangerous defiance as he meets friends and relatives.
This is not a densely emotional novel, and the translator jars readers by confusing vernacular English with flat cliches. It is a personal but mainly intellectual appraisal of how oppressive dictatorships affected the everyday lives of citizens. But it does tell of a moral struggle as the young man copes with the conflicting pressures placed upon him; and that was satisfying for me, coming as it did immediately after I read the winner of last year's Man Booker, The Gathering by Anne Enright.
All good fiction, I believe, must have a moral dimension, some sense of struggle. Even if the protagonists lack the personal resources to prevail against adversity and fail, a sense of moral sensitivity should pervade a story. But the main character and narrator of The Gathering is a self-hating, self-pitying woman who has no pity left for others but plenty of hatred.
Totally without charm or true affection for anyone else, she spreads trouble among her family and friends, often casually and without the slightest compunction. Over the last few pages, the author tries to redeem her character by suggesting acceptance of her lot, but it fails.
That The Gathering won the Booker demonstrates that literary prizes rely more on the compromises of horse-trading among judges with disparate points of view than with the quality of the story-telling. Which I guess is inevitable. After all, the competitions are a promotional activity.
Agamemnon'S Daughter
By Ismail Kadare (Canongate $27)
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.