The Palace of Dreams

by Ismail Kadare

Book Overview

The mysterious Palace of Dreams stands at the heart of a vast but fragile Balkan empire. Inside, workers assiduously sift, sort, classify, and ultimately interpret the dreams of the empire's citizens.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559704160
• ISBN13: 9781559704168
• Release Date: February 1998
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 205 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. Ismail Kadare's "The Palace of Dreams" is a book that reads like Kafka as influenced by the painter M.C. Escher with a bit of "1001 Arabian Nights" thrown in for good measure. Ismail Kadare is an Albanian poet and writer. He is also the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and was selected from a list of nominees that included Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Milan Kundera, and Gunter Grass. The Palace of Dreams is one of his best known, many say best, work. "Palace of Dreams" is set some time in the 19th-century in an Islamic-ruled Ottoman Empire that includes the Balkans (including Kadare's native Albania). The Palace of the title is a mammoth office building where the dreams of everyone in the kingdom are submitted for analysis. It is a Byzantine bureaucracy whose complexity is matched only by the dark, complex hallways and byways of the building itself. The Sultanate considers the dreams of his subjects to contain clues to the future. Like an oracle of Delphi, dreams are interpreted to predict plots against the Sultan or threat to the Empire generally. The interpretation of dreams is a powerful tool used to run the Empire and control its citizens and as a result the Palace of Dreams is the most feared agency in existence. Into the Palace of Dreams steps a young new employee, Mark-Alem. Mark-Alem is a member of the Quprili family. The Quprilis are a powerful family of Albanian origin. For generations the family has produced high-ranking Viziers, the approximate equivalent of Cabinet Ministers, to the Sultan. Although a powerful family the Quprili's relationship over the years with various Sultans has been rocky and has been marked by purges and bitter in-fighting. The tenuous relationship between the Quprilis and the Sultan forms the backdrop of the story. After Mark-Alem makes his way through a maze of corridors he is taken on as an apprentice. He quickly moves from a clerical position, sorting dreams, to interpreting them. Kadare's writing is very powerful as he traces Mark-Alem's path as an employee on the fast-track. One can feel the job beginning to overwhelm Mark-Alem's thoughts and actions. What seemed as unreal to Mark-Alem as an apprentice now seems commonplace. In a certain sense Kadare portrays vividly one person's descent into a claustrophobic, mystical hell where dreams are more real than reality. At the same time renewed tensions between the Sultan and the Quprilis emerge. One specific dream involving a bridge in Albania built by the Quprilis hundreds of years ago quickly becomes the centerpiece of the plot. This same bridge played a critical role in an earlier Kadare novel, "The Three-Arched Bridge". Mark-Alem finds himself faced with analyzing this dream and the consequences of that interpretation drives the last third of the novel. Palace of Dreams has been doubly-translated, first from Albanian to French and t

A dangerous ghost state

In Kadare's hallucinatory novel, the most important ministry in the country is the one where the dreams of all its citizens are interpreted. A monstrous bureaucratic organization collects those dreams and a monstrous herd of employees classifies and analyzes them. The interpretation of the apparently most important dream is presented every week to the sultan, because it could contain crucial information about the destiny of the country and the ruling families.The whole country has really turned into a ghost state, where people perform ghost work: Absurdistan.Of course, this macabre ministry is only a veil for the bitter power struggle between the powerful. A bad dream interpretation could create an opportunity to lash out at the other throne contenders with deadly consequences for the innocent common citizens. The for the common man seemingly blind fatality is in fact the result of a deadly fight for control and power between the mighty.Kadare's novel, inspired by Enver Hoxha's Albania, is a masterful portrait of the totalitarian state, where real life is replaced by hallucinations. The government's most important role is to try to control even the dreams of its citizens. A dark nightmarish regime.This highly political work is composed and reads like a thriller. A real masterpiece.

"They 're Selling Postcards of the Hanging...."

Dreams flow into Istanbul from all corners of the Ottoman Empire to be sorted, interpreted, stored, or acted upon by an enormous bureaucracy of faceless figures. Wheels operate within wheels: nobody really knows what is going on except a few puppet-masters at the top. The innocent scion of a high, powerful family begins work in the Tabir Sarrail, that cavernous palace of endless blank corridors which, like Dr. Who?s Tardis, is much bigger inside than out. Sinister goings on, always just out of sight, almost out of earshot. Mark-Alem learns as he goes. His meteoric rise may have ominous significance. Maybe not. He has to make sense out of the senseless. He has to give meaning to the meaningless. Interpretation is everything, but a wrong twist could lead to fatal disaster. Are his fellow workers in on some dark secrets that he has failed to decipher ? Or are they just as they seem, friendly and struggling ? The world of power dazzles and depresses simultaneously. When is Ismail Kadare going to get the Nobel Prize ? I have asked this before. THE PALACE OF DREAMS is yet another masterpiece by this Albanian author. It has links to ?The Three-Arched Bridge?, another of his great novels. While the tenor of THE PALACE OF DREAMS is entirely different from the latter work, they do the share the enviable quality of operating on several levels, which to my mind, always indicates the highest craftsmanship. The present volume resembles Kafka more than a little, perhaps also is reminiscent of Sartre?s play ?No Exit?. At one level it is such a nightmarish fantasy, a bad dream played out in a couple hundred pages. At a second level, Kadare succeeded in writing a magnificent replica of the workings of secret security agencies within the administration of Communist era nations like Albania. Part terror, part nightmare, he sets his story in the 19th century Ottoman empire to avoid personal repercussions (the book was banned in Albania anyway). ?Anyone who ruled over the dark zones of men?s lives wielded enormous power.? Dream Palace or Sigurimi, the Albanian security agency ? It does not matter. By linking the protagonist to the Quprili family, a genuine Albanian-born dynasty of Ottoman officials and administrators, and to the recital of Albanian folk epics, Kadare ties the dream palace to actual history in a very clever way. The voice of the people must eventually be heard--it is only a question of when. This is a most clever book and Kadare fans should not miss it. If you haven?t started reading him yet, you could well begin here.

An intoxicating, dazzling nightmare

This is a small masterpiece of a book. "The Palace of Dreams" is the place where the dreams and nightmares of all the citizens of the Ottoman Empire are obsessively examined by experts, looking for omens and potential threats to the state. This is the premise of this provocative, hallucinating voyage into the absurdity and ultimate terror of totalitarian power. "The Palace of Dreams" is a powerful examination of fear and of the way it eventually turns a man's soul into stone, into another lifeless fragment of a monstrous sacrificial stone. A sinister allegory. A unique book. Don't miss it.

A necessary book

Since reading Alan Paton's 'Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful', I have wondered whether I would read another author with a similarly spare and powerful narrative style. This is the first book I've read by Ismail Kadare and I'm eagerly looking forward to reading his other works. In certain books, because of plot tension and so on, one is impelled to 'devour' the story; Kadare forces the reader to slow down and re-read pages, not just for the beauty of the prose but because of the many layers at which the book can be read. It is almost sufic in intensity. Mr. Kadare carefully builds tension and terror around his central character, Mark-Alem, from the endless corridors among which he fearfully wanders to the seemingly inexplicable promotions; from his family's tentative hopes about his new job to their tentatively expressed fears about it. The Tabir-Sarrail itself, Palace of Dreams, is expertly realized as a monstrous character.Do read this book.