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A review by eigendecomp
Broken April by Ismail Kadare
5.0
The Albanian highlands are a gloomy place where hard-nosed and hard-scrabble peasants eke out a precarious living farming corn. Even the mountain fairies in their tales seem to be hard-nosed and hard-scrabble.
What glamour there is in the peasants' lives derives from their participation in self-perpetuating blood-feuds, regulated (like everything else) by the ancient set of oral laws known as the Kanun.
What sort of person goes there on his honeymoon?
A fool, if you ask me. A somewhat romantic fool, perhaps - I will grant you that - but a fool nevertheless.
Bessian is a fashionable writer from Tirana, the capital of Albania. He has made his name by works in which he waxed lyrical about the highlands, the peasants, and the Kanun. But he has never actually been there. So he takes his young, beautiful, and impressionable wife Diana to the highlands on their honeymoon-cum-research-trip.
Predictably, nothing good comes out of it.
At a late point in the novel, Bessian somewhat casually drops the name of Marx. It is not clear whether he has actually read or understood him, but in my opinion, he would have done far better by himself to attend carefully to Nietzsche's famous dictum "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you".
What glamour there is in the peasants' lives derives from their participation in self-perpetuating blood-feuds, regulated (like everything else) by the ancient set of oral laws known as the Kanun.
What sort of person goes there on his honeymoon?
A fool, if you ask me. A somewhat romantic fool, perhaps - I will grant you that - but a fool nevertheless.
Bessian is a fashionable writer from Tirana, the capital of Albania. He has made his name by works in which he waxed lyrical about the highlands, the peasants, and the Kanun. But he has never actually been there. So he takes his young, beautiful, and impressionable wife Diana to the highlands on their honeymoon-cum-research-trip.
Predictably, nothing good comes out of it.
At a late point in the novel, Bessian somewhat casually drops the name of Marx. It is not clear whether he has actually read or understood him, but in my opinion, he would have done far better by himself to attend carefully to Nietzsche's famous dictum "If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you".