Agamemnon's Daughter
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
In this spellbinding novel, written in Albania and smuggled into France a few pages at a time in the 1980s, Kadare denounces with rare force the machinery of the dictatorial regime, drawing us back to the ancient roots of Western civilization and tyranny.
The partner to The Successor, Agamemnon's Daughter is an impeccably crafted, psychologically incisive tale of a disappointed lover's odyssey through a single day and his gradual realization of how the utter cruelty of dictatorship can express itself even in matters of the heart.
The day begins as the unnamed narrator waits in vain for his lover Suzana, daughter of “The Successor,” even though he knows that she will have to sacrifice their love for her father's success. As he moves through the crowded streets on the great socialist holiday, May 1st, the narrator recalls episodes of his life that illustrate the vast system of absurdity, paranoia, and cruelty that was Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha.
Finally, as he watches Suzana in her decorated viewing box, the narrator realizes what her sacrifice truly means. Like that of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, which loosed the bloody nine years of the Trojan War, Suzana's will serve to open a new floodgate of persecution and purging, from which no one will be safe.
This book also showcases two stories by this European master of fiction, “The Blinding Order,” a parable about the uses of terror set in the Ottoman Empire, and “The Great Wall,” a chilling duet between a Chinese official and a soldier in the invading army of the great Central Asian conqueror of the 14th century, Tamerlane.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kadare won the Man Booker International Prize last year for his searing documentation, in numerous works, of Albanian history and politics, particularly life under Communism (The General of the Dead Army, etc.). This miscellany contains the title novella, finished in 1985 and published here in English for the first time, and two stories. The novella, a companion to Kadare's The Successor, follows one day in the life of a young, unnamed journalist about to attend a celebratory May Day parade (under Communism, a highly charged political function). His "half-girl, half-woman" lover, Suzana, whose father's political star is one the rise, has just left the journalist in a sort of political sacrifice (the journalist is "practically engaged to someone else" and it looks bad). Through a wry and compelling set of ruminations on the grandstand, the journalist finds that a government that would deny young love denies humanity, and seeks the isolation of every citizen which in turn pits neighbor against neighbor in a fever of paranoid denunciation. That simple but powerful insight also lies behind the two shorter, more allegorical works in the collection, "The Blinding Order" and "The Great Wall," which were completed in 1984 and 1993 respectively.
