Not-So-Great Pretender

...Greek, Roman, Slav, Venetian, and Ottoman architectural gems are numerous...

...The Successor stands among Kadare's works with overtly political themes, but its indeterminate and formulaic style serves as a thin shroud for its subject: The very real death, in December 1981, in the capital of Tirana, of Mehmet She-hu, the 68-year-old second-in-command to Hoxha...

...Shehu was a battlefield commander of Albanian partisans during World War II, and became a notably cruel Communist boss in his own right...

...The immediate pretext for Shehu's downfall has long been known—the seemingly trivial romantic alliance of his child with a member of an anti-Communist family, as mentioned in The Successor without serious elaboration...

...The common element in all of Kadare’s fiction is stylistic detachment...

...Mehmet She-hu, an adventurer and soldier, had always excited jealousy in the feckless and effete Hoxha, who affected expensive Italian suits and boutique footwear, and preferred party offices to army fortresses...

...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Ismail Kadare is the only Albanian intellectual well known outside the lands where that language is spoken...

...If anyone alive knows the truth of how She-hu perished, it is Ismail Kadare—but he has chosen not to disclose it...

...This book may be called a roman a clef—but only barely, since its dust jacket and other publicity matter explicitly identify it with She-hu's demise...

...Three of his books, including The Two Faces of Islam, have appeared in Albanian...

...Still, their disengaged temper and insubstantial tissue, set in a fantasy land best called Kadaria, appeal to Western European readers, who take them as simple, undemanding fables perfect for beach reading...

...These titles have been successful with Western readers thanks to their exoticism, an occasional air of menace and suspense, and touches of romance...

...The Successor, originally published in 2003, is his most recent novel rendered in English...

...an old hyena...

...But this led to numerous protests by Albanians and their friends, as well as by experts on Albanian culture and history, who are not fooled...

...Yet an introductory note by Kadare states that the resemblance of the characters and circumstances in the book to real individuals and events is "inevitable...

...A Communist hack reinvents himself as a martyr to liberty...

...More important, the Albanians feared and distrusted all Serbs, including Communists...

...The other stream of Kadare narratives is political: The General of the Dead Army, published here in 1990, and The Concert (1998...

...Kadare’s novels fall into two categories...

...In 1990, while the Albanian Communists still enjoyed absolute power, the future author of The Successor published a book titled Invitation to the Studio...

...Three of his books, including The Two Faces of Islam, have appeared in Albanian...

...Since his departure from Albania, Kadare has made an extraordinary effort to present himself as an anti-Hoxha dissident when, in fact, he was a figurehead for the most tyrannical order in Balkan history, and a persecutor of intellectual dissidents...

...The Albanians preferred to fight alongside the Italian antifascists, which appears logical since Mussolini sent mercenaries to Spain while pursuing imperialist designs on the small Balkan land...

...Pipa defected to the United States in 1958 and died in Washington in 1997...

...absolutely a spy...

...Kadare presents the death of Shehu as a mystery, and the primary enigma is whether Shehu killed himself or was murdered...

...Kadare himself thus contributed to the original and unmysterious mystification about the death of Shehu...

...Anyone who has traveled among the Albanians cannot but wonder what impression Kadare's tales make on those who have not...

...earlier this year he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize by clueless judges who treated him as a champion of creative freedom...

...Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor...

...It is also revealed, in passing, that the Successor's daughter Suzana has been involved with a man whose family has roots in the pre-Communist epoch and who is, therefore, politically suspect...

...In reality, there is little that is puzzling about the death of Mehmet Shehu, aside from whether he was simply killed outright or forced to commit "suicide...

...When Albania sided with China against Russia at the beginning of the 1960s, Shehu was said by Anastas Mikoyan to have declared, "Anyone who disagrees with our leadership on any point will get spit in the face, a blow on his chin, and, if necessary, a bullet in his head...

...The Successor is, then, truly fictional in its intentional blurring of the facts in the Shehu case—not for literary purposes, but to shield Kadare himself...

...From the moment of his death, everybody in Albania and abroad understood that Hoxha, dominated by paranoia, had eliminated a rival—by no means the first, or the only one, whose liquidation was arbitrary and brutal...

...Kadare referred to this Muslim opponent of dictatorship by the Serbian name Pipitch, which he compared to the sound of urination...

...In Invitation to the Studio, Kadare denounced Pipa as "diabolical...

...ancient Balkan legends...

...Kadare has tried for years to get the Nobel Prize...

...The landscape of the Albanian lands is diverse and sometimes spectacular: the high, stunningly lonely peaks known as "the Accursed Mountains," and other impressive ranges, as well as immense lakes and the green fields of Kosovo...

...But Albanians have enduring memories—strong enough to recall the case of Mehmet Shehu without help from an obfuscating novelist—and should Kadare get the Nobel Prize, Albanians and their genuine friends will not be fooled...

...It has also led, in response, to loud, defensive squeals from Professor Bellos at Princeton, who has made the promotion of Kadare his main resume item...

...The word “translation” does not really apply here because David Bellos, a Princeton professor of French, does not know Albanian, and reworked this version, and his earlier such efforts with Kadare’s writings, from French editions...

...Given the recent record of the Swedish Academy in presenting that honor to such charlatans as last year's recipient, Harold Pinter, Kadare should not have much longer to wait...

...But finally, The Successor's recounting of the Shehu case is evanescent, ending in confusion...

...to his misfortune mediocre...

...They reproduce the ideological issues and convoluted relationships in Communist Albania under the dictatorship created by Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1944 until his death in 1985...

...Volumes like Doruntine, published here in 1990, The Three-Arched Bridge (1997), Broken April (1998), and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2002) revive Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor...

...These include references to the Kanun, or Albanian customary law, which must be incomprehensible to foreigners...

...It never names the two main figures, Hoxha and Shehu, except as the Guide and (eponymously) the Successor...

...They sometimes center on a woeful but enduring tradition, the blood feud, which remains a serious problem in northern Albania...

...Prizes are awarded, and the chests of bien-pensants swell with pride...

...As will be seen, it is genuinely fictional, but in a way destined to be overlooked by most non-Albanians...

...Such is the state of literature today...

...In the real incident, a wedding engagement linked a son of Shehu, rather than a daughter, with a relative of Arshi Pipa, a dissident author and scholar...

...his books, in a little-known language, are introduced to American readers by a man "translating" at second hand, missing references and nuances present in a foreign idiom...

...Much of the plot is taken up with speculation, and even dreams, about these figures...

...By contrast, Shehu was a veteran of the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war, where, like other Albanians, he refused assignment to a battalion under Yugoslav Communist officers...

...a snitch...

...Kadare has been fairly successful at this game among non-Albanians...

...He then left for France, where sales of his writing in translation had provided him with a respectable bank account...

...And now, the backstory...

...Ismail Kadare, a long-serving functionary of the Democratic Front, the Albanian ruling authority under communism, does not come to the Shehu-Pipa case with clean hands...

...But Kadare does not excel at description, and seems a stranger in his native country, even as his stories, which transpire mainly in the minds of his characters, incorporate many an obscure note...

...The final chapter is a monologue by the dead Shehu, which leaves the "mystery" unresolved...

...Phrases in Hungarian and Mongolian are gratuitously introduced, apparently to heighten the sense of the bizarre...

...a new Salieri...

...After Shehu's death, Hoxha produced a thick book entitled The Titoites, portraying Shehu as a traitor beginning with his service in Spain, and specifically condemning him for letting a member of his tribe consort with the clan of Pipa...

...A number of potential suspects are introduced, ranging from the dictator to the dead man's wife, and from a potential successor to the Successor to an architect working on the Successor's residence...

...In Kadare's quotation from the rhetoric of the time, the Successor "had pushed his daughter into the enemy's clutches...

...Although Muslim, Pipa was a strong defender of the Catholic minority in Albania, a particular bete noire of Hoxha...