The Second Circle
Review
THE PALACE OF
DREAMS
by
Ismail Kadare
reviewed
by Fin Keegan
FOR A PERIOD of six months towards the end of the 1990s
this reviewer read for the Fiction Department of a major
New York magazine of no small pretension and more Names
in its past and present than, well, one could easily shake
a stick at. My job in those haunted halls was simple:
to read (i.e. to reduce; to liquidate) the Slush Pile,
a Ionescian execresence of paper that was crawling
up one wall of the office and threatening to choke a much-traversed
shortcut through to the sanctum of the Literary Editor,
a man who had already suffered his share for art (some of it at the hands of the Italian riot police, but that's another story). This mound of
unsolicited short fiction, a slow-motion volcano crudely
distributed in Post Office bins as if by an Emergency
Response team, was the most famous--and certainly the
biggest--such heap in the world. Escaping it meant, and still means, instantaneous transformation of
a life, the literary equivalent of triumphing
on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".
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THE PALACE
OF DREAMS
by
Ismail
Kadare
You may order this title by clicking on the link corresponding to your delivery region below: orders are fulfilled by our partners at Amazon.
ALL
TERRITORIES
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But, like
the inhabitants of shanty towns everywhere, nobody really escapes Slushville.
Victories there may be, but they are usually Phyrric: a handwritten
rejection slip from the Magazine is a much sought after prize.
And, unlike Kafka's parable, each supplicant doesn't get their own doorkeeper. This writer had first to belong to a
particular university which is neither easy to matriculate into
nor cheap to attend. Beyond that he had to compete against his
classmates, a not insignificant number, to make a short-list of
three candidates, then dress up and venture downtown for grilling--in
three seperate interviews by three different staff members--at
the Magazine's offices. The winning candidate was issued a wad
of rejection slips as thick as a telephone book and sent to the
office canteen with as many manuscripts as he could safely carry (for there
is no dedicated desk and besides the process of rejection is unsightly).
All this nonsense may or may not be commonplace in contemporary
Albania; and yet to read Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams
[Nepunesi i pallatit te endrrave, Tirana 1981] is to
be reminded of those situations when one has, for whatever reason,
become a beauracratic cog, part of an institutional machine
(health insurers, government departments, media organisations,
the secret police) which has to, or thinks it has to, process
the emotional stuff of humankind. In the Palace of Dreams this
effluent is not, as so often now in the West, encoded into ones
and zeros, but the legally obligated dream diaries of an empire's
citizens.
Our hero, a diligent young man by the
name of Mark-Alem, has been drafted into the Palace, run by
a vast army of sad civil servants, and, like them is faced with
sifting through an unending stream of fantasies and dreams,
charged with panning out any divinations of a plot against the
Sultan, Emperor of a Balkan empire centered on Albania. Though
coming from a long line of Viziers and governers, Mark-Alem
nonetheless begins at the bottom, grappling exhaustively with
the tangled wishes and fears of a multitude. It is not long
before his persistance gains him promotion (from an office dedicated
to "Selection" to one preoccupied with "Interpretation") and
nightmarish insights into the anti-human workings of a repressive
state. Needless to say the book, which came out in the bad old
days of Hoxhism (Enver Hoxha, Albania's dictator for many decades,
ceased being a Stalinist only to become a Maoist) was banned
as soon as it appeared. Kadare, much of whose work met with
this fate, ended up fleeing to France, where he now lives.
BEGGAR THAN A CHURCH RAT
The Palace of Dreams is a rewarding book, easy to read,
atmospheric, curiously anachronistic now even though its message
is, as they say, timeless (the novel's natural fellows being Darkness at
Noon, say, or 1984). One caveat: the fact that the
book is translated from Albanian into French and thence into
English hardly inspires confidence. Its tortured journey into
the world's lingua franca reminds one of that Portuguese-English
phrase-book produced in the 1880s whose author, one Pedro Carolino,
spoke not a word of English, a lack he surmounted by way of
a Portuguese-French dictionary and a French-English phrasebook.
In the end he produced such proverbs as "He is beggar as a church
rat" and "A bad arrangement is better than a process".
One could hardly accuse Barbara Bray,
who can at least speak fluent English, of foisting such infelicities
on Kadare's readers--though on the opening page we read of our
hero feeling "an ironical grimace flit briefly over his still-numb
face". Surely the Two Languages Principle (as Comrade Hoxha
might say) is sound and, if not by Nobel Laureates, should by
professional translators at least be observed, that is to say:
where possible one ought to avoid dragging a work of the imagination
across more than one language. I refuse to believe that the
publishers could not dig up a single English speaker who read
Albanian literature and could write a decent sentence in his
mother tongue. Perhaps they didn't look beyond their pavilion
at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Not that publishing Ismail Kadare is an uncomplicated matter
in other respects: he has earned more column inches in the West
for his political ambiguities than for his work itself. The
fact is, exile and banned author that he may be, Kadare was closely acquianted with Albania's elite and is said to have debated with the dictator personally about his work (while
humbler critics perished in detention). But however murky
all this gets one hesitates to sit in judgment of a
writer who had to live and create in the familial totalitarianism
of Hoxha's Albania. Undeniably, The Palace of Dreams
is a powerful work of Anti-Totalitarianism and not the kind
of thing an immoral writer could, would or would ever want to produce. Moreover, the Dreamworks moralism with which we judge writers of the former Eastern bloc, would have lasted five minues in the Tirana of old.
LAST TRAIN TO SLUSHVILLE
Incidentally, to return to the yellowing heaps of Slushville, I have
noticed that Internet newsgroups and writer's magazines regularly
speculate what could possibly go through the minds of those
elect who sift, review and almost invariably reject the many
thousands of short stories that pour into The Magazine each
month. These "elect", I can now reveal, spend much of their
dreamy read-time speculating what the submitters themselves
could possibly have intended when they sent in material more
fit for analysis than publication.
For the record the leading themes of
these stories, discounting the ramblings of the insane, were:
picaresque imaginings of the lives of amputees;
levitating housewives;
talking cats or household pets, and;
the first sexual exploits of post-war youth.
I would advise anyone with more than a passing interest in
a fiction-writing career to steer as clear as possible from
these seemingly innocuous subjects--although, needless to say,
those who ignore me are the likeliest to succeed.
Fin Keegan
Other reviews
by Fin Keegan at The Second Circle:
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail
Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice
Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of
the Harvill Press
A Profile of
the Editions de Minuit
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