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An exquisite writer who lays claim to traditions of Homer
Book Review
By Derryll White
Kadare, Ismael (1989). The File on H.
“Just as in the metabolism of living beings, so in oral poetry, death is what guarantees that life goes on.”
Kadare won The Man Booker International Prize in 2005, one of the world’s top literary awards. This novel is set in Albania, which should not be a surprise as Ismael Kadare is considered Albania’s best-known poet and novelist.
First translated into French by Jusuf Vrioni the text was then translated into English by David Bellos. In spite of that process the story reads wonderfully and seamlessly.
The story is simple and very exciting to someone with my inclinations. Kadare immediately blends Cervantes and Le Carré with Dr. William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, that’s how he reads to me. A romantic Qixotix chase after the Greek poet Homer, through unknown foreign territory. I am ready to read all night and then break out my boots and backpack in the morning, switching to Lonely Planet travel guides for Greece and Albania, and texts on the birth of epic poetry. And then perhaps on to Iceland and Norway. Wait – I have to pull myself back to ‘The File on H.’!
The premise of the novel is that the foundation of Homeric verse (The Iliad and The Odyssey), the best known examples of the long oral tradition of raconteur work, is still in practice in the Balkans. Capturing this material may offer huge insights to modern Homeric scholars. And so Irish scholars Bill and Max charge off into the centre of Balkan intrigue, thereby feeding the suspicions, fears and enmities of ages.
They explore and they stumble into the Serbo-Albanian tragic-comedy of race, nationalism and tribal ignorance. From all of that comes a loving novel exhorting the beauty of epic poetry and the magic of oral tradition, Kadare is an exquisite writer who treasures his Albanian roots and, in sideways fashion, lays claim to the traditions of Homer. A beautiful and exhilarating read.
“When we have collected dozens and dozens more recordings, then maybe we will have a better position to elucidate this strange commerce between memory and forgetting.”
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Excerpts from the novel:
THE DAY – She had indeed spent an unutterably drab morning. The windows were streaked with rain, as they had been the day before. Seen through the dripping-wet panes, the chimney son the other side of the street all looked crooked. My God, another whole day just like yesterday, she had thought, sighing as she lay on her bed. Not a single idea managed to take shape in her mind; for the likeness of this day to the last seemed to her the clearest proof that it would be another quite useless day, a day she would gladly have done without.
THE VISION – “Is it silly to wonder if there’s a country or region in the world today where such epic poetry is maybe still being invented?” … The classicist explained that such an area did indeed exist, that it was not a very large area, and it was the only one in the world where that kind of poetry was still cultivated. He said exactly where it was: in the Balkan peninsula… “This region is the only place in the world where poetic material of the Homeric kind is still being produced. In other words I would say that it is the last surviving foundry, the last available laboratory…”
THE EPIC – The rhapsode began to sing, in a voice quite unlike his speaking voice. It was unnatural, cold, unwavering, full of an anguish that seemed to come from another world. It made Bill’s spine tingle… It felt as if he were being emptied from inside, as if his guts were being drawn out of him, as if his inner being were slowly being wound, along a wooden thread turning on a distaff. The rhapsode’s voice had the ability to hollow you out.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org
