The File on H.

by Ismail Kadare

Book Overview

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a 'new fangled' invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559706279
• ISBN13: 9781559706278
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Dark Comedy of Spies and Homeric Epics, Set in Albania

Published in Albanian in 1981, translated into a French version in 1989, and thence into English from the French version in 1997, Ismail Kadare's THE FILE ON H is nevertheless a triumphant novella of Balkan dark humor and fatalism. As he so often has in his other works, Kadare pulls back the covers on the arbitrary nature of life in a totalitarian state and its effects on everyone from government officials to the lowliest hermit. The day may well yet arrive when Kadare receives the Nobel Prize for Literature to the typically American reaction, "Who?" THE FILE ON H follows a relatively simple plot line. Two Irish researchers in Homeric literature, Bill Norton and Max Ross, travel from Harvard to Albania in the 1930's. Their mission: to use a wondrous new technology, the voice recorder, to capture on tape the epic poetry of Albania's lahuta players, a vanishing breed of wandering singers who for generations have carried forward the country's oral story-telling tradition. By capturing and studying different renditions of these epic tales, even comparing the same lahuta player's multiple versions of the same epic sung over a period of weeks, Norton and Ross hope to gain new understanding of how such Greek epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey developed and evolved without having been written down, and perhaps as well Homer's true role therein as author, reteller, redactor, or cataloger. Thus, they have come to the last remaining locale where oral epics are still sung, and by default the only place where they may in fact still be evolving. Naturally, the arrival of two Westerners with such magical machinery engenders suspicion that they are spies. This judgment is only furthered along the way by the foreigners' insistence that they not remain in the more refined city of N___, that they wish instead to spend up to three or four months in a thousand-year-old inn known as the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo. As a precautionary measure, the governor of N___ assigns his trusted informer, Dull Baxhaja, to watch and report on the two Irishmen's activities in the hopes of uncovering their real plans. All goes well at the Buffalo Inn, and Ross and Nelson are convinced they are simultaneously preserving a dying craft and gaining valuable new insights into the Homeric tradition. One day, a mysterious Serbian monk named Dushan appears at the Inn and sets in motion a chain of events that bring the full impact of a thousand years of ethnic and political enmity crashing down on the two unsuspecting classicists and their project with unintentionally ironic results. Kadare is immensely playful as he unrolls his story. Nelson and Ross arrive speaking Albanian, but their version is as hilariously outmoded as Old English would be to an American. Dull Baxhaja, the governor's spy, is given to writing reports full of magnificently convoluted sentences and over-the-top grammatical flourishes, to which the governor of N___ only shakes his head in utter admiration. The nature

Even A. B. Lord must be laughing in his grave

This volume is a delightful story that immediately reminded me of Lord's The Singer of Tales. Two Irish Homeric scholars set out to record the songs of the epic-singers, to compare versions told at different time and/or by differents singers ... does that sound like Lord's research? Here, however, it is the story of collectors of the epics and the internal security officers of Albania that are the heart of the story - a very funny story poking fun at ignorance, fear, position ...When the Irish researchers arrive, the governor's wife has day dreams of an affair, the office of the Interior Ministry has dreams of snaring the perfect biographer, the governor is out to snare the spies with counterspies who don't know English, a Serbian monk who tries to insure that the epics are recognized as Serbian not Albanian ...This book is an absolute joy to read - a witty commentary on totalitarian government and the manipulation of people.

Amazing!

Another great work by Ismail Kadare. Albania of 1930s is in this book. His style of writing allows you to be part of each character's feelings and deeper thoughts. You will find the past, the present and the future of Albania and its mentality intermingled with the quest for the survival of the epic song.

Suspicion keeps everyone in the dark

Two Irish-American scholars of Homeric ballads arrive in remote northern Albania to record local epic songs in the early 1930s. Nobody has ever seen a tape recorder before. The two men speak archaic Albanian learned from books. Local officials are sure they are spies. (But why there ?) Informers are positioned to report every move and word. A local official's wife longs for an affair. Weird monks and treacherous Serbians move in. It's a strange mix of satire and scholarship, farce and fact. Kadare constructed this novel on the basis of an actual American `expedition' to the Balkans to collect ballads in order to study the process by which such epics were remembered, forgotten, and reshaped. Though the Harvard scholars' efforts ended in a completely different manner, Kadare used this seed to create THE FILE ON H. H in this case is not like Kafka's K or Ian Fleming's M, a nameless individual, but stands for Homer.In Hoxha's Albania, writing satire on spies and attitudes towards foreigners was doubtless dangerous. Kadare got away with it only because he set the novel in the royalist period of 1928-1939, when Albania was under King Zog. It is an enjoyable book, though not as stunning as some of his others (i.e. "Broken April", "The Three-Arched Bridge", "Chronicle in Stone") The translation, too, may not be as strong as it could have been. As an American with some familiarity with Ireland, I found his Irish-American characters much less believable than his Albanian ones. Their actions and dialogues often don't ring true. But, as another volume in his literary panorama of Albanian history and sentiment, this novel is well worth reading. It contains many flashes of the Kadare genius.

OUTSTANDING. BETTER THAN ZARATHUSTRA.

This book is an achievment not only for Kadare's literary work; it is also philosophy together with art history and national genesis.