The File On H. : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Hybrid
Review: I found this novel one of the less successful works of Ismail Kadare.

It is a mixture of a literary research tale and a political spy novel with 'Madame Bovary' aspects.
Two Irish researchers are looking for old Albanian epic poems in order to discover the enigma of the composition of H(omeros)' epics. The government thinks that they are spies, while the governor's wife dreams of an extramarital affair.
The essential background problem is the division of Albania which was forced to give up Kosovo to Serbia. Even the assignment of epic poems to Albania or Serbia turns out to be an insurmountable problem!

I found the mixture a little bit improbable and the political reactions more or less exaggerated.
This book is still a very worth-while read, although it doesn't reach the same high level as Kadare's masterpieces, e.g. 'The General of the Dead Army' or 'The Pyramid', which treated universal human problems.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing!
Review: This is an engaging book, but it's not as good as most of Kadare's work. Two Homeric scholars travel to Albania to study and record that nation's epic poetry. They are met with suspicion on the part of King Zog's bureaucrats, who assume they must be spies. As in all of Kadare's novels, the Albanian people and landscape are evoked with an extraordinary sympathy. However, the Americans, ostensibly the novel's heroes, are surprisingly flat characters. One gets the feeling that Kadare is too attached to his homeland to imagine how an outsider would view it. Still, the subject of the Albanian epic is fascinating, and very few English-language works (original or translated) address it at all. This novel, as well as Kadare's _Palace of Dreams_, provides an enjoyable introduction.

Rating:
Summary: Even A. B. Lord must be laughing in his grave
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Even A. B. Lord must be laughing in his grave
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Suspicion keeps everyone in the dark
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not the best of Kadare
Review: Unique, witty, and very comedic but still not one of my favorite Kadare books. Perhaps it lost more in translation than some others have, or perhaps it is just not to my tastes. I still recommend others of his books to readers before they try this one. This is a wonderful book for the die-hard Kadare fan but will do little to make you such a fan in the first place.