Agamemnon's Daughter
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
In his compelling prequel to The Successor, Kadare draws us into a land deprived of choice, a country under a reign of terror. The spellbinding Agamemnon's Daughter was written in Albania in the 1980s and smuggled into France a few pages at a time. It reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds.
From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state. Through the impeccably crafted, incisive tale of a thwarted lover's odyssey through a single day, we are given a true sense of how hard it can be to remain human in a world ruled by fear and suspicion.
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.
