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Friday, June 03, 2005
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A WRITER FROM THE BALKAN FRINGE UD and an Albanian visiting professor at GW are doing an independent study this summer on the novel Chronicle in Stone, by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. Vana is writing an essay on the historical and social background of the novel in order to make the book more accessible to English-speaking audiences. Naturally, before she started reading the novel and having long lunches with Vana, UD knew nothing much about Albania beyond its tragic and farcical Marxist years. She was surprised by how spectacularly good the novel was - a modernist montage in form, but grounded in the surreal realities of World War I and II Albanian life - and she found herself getting quite enthusiastic about the project of making Kadare better known. He was every bit as good as better known writers who do similar things in novels like The Ogre (Michel Tournier), The Tin Drum (Gunther Grass) and Shame (Salman Rushdie). UD just got an email from Vana with the following article attached: London — Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare won the first-ever international version of Britain's prestigious Man Booker literary prize Friday, beating the likes of Canadian Margaret Atwood. Kadare, 69, fled his homeland and won political asylum in France in 1990, only a few months before Albania's communist regime ended. Before that, his French publisher, Editions Fayard, smuggled his work out of Albania, the prize committee said. “Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture -- its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters,” said John Carey, chairman of the judging committee. “He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.” Kadare said he hoped the prize, given for his body of work, would give the world a different perspective on the tiny Balkan country and its neighbours. “I am a writer from the Balkan fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness -- armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on,” he said. “My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realize that this region ... can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilization,” he said. Kadare, who writes both poetry and prose, became well known in his homeland with the 1963 publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. Among his other works are The Three Arched Bridge, The Concert, and The Palace of Dreams. The Man Booker International Prize, the creation of which was announced last year, is open to authors of all nationalities whose work has been either written or translated widely into English. The $109,000 (U.S.) prize will be awarded for a body of work every two years. The existing annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded for a single work, and is open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies. Among the 18 finalists for the international prize announced in February were Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Kenzaburo Oe. Other finalists included Atwood, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Doris Lessing. Kadare will receive his prize at a ceremony in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 27. He is to choose a translator or translators to get an additional prize of $27,000. |