Another world: Albania and "Agamemnon's Daughter"

Ismail Kadare wrote Agamemnon's Daughter circa 1985, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the beginning end of what we once called Eastern Europe.  It is simultaneously a depiction of the banality of political repression -- the way it seeps into every human interaction, even just seeing someone across a crowd -- and an evocation of the extreme horrors (sacrificing their own children) that those in power will enact to preserve and extend their grip.

The setting is Albania. If you need help to locate it on a map, look just above Greece, across from Italy's "heel." Maybe this will help.

Albania was Communist from 1942 to 1992. You can read more about the contemporary history of the country and its current governmental and "transition economic" systems at Wikipedia or other resources online. 

My recollections are that as Communist country, it was even more extremely controlled than most of the Eastern Bloc, with almost no contact with "the west." Kadare's manuscript was smuggled out bits at a time, in part because exporting works about Albania was prohibited. That tale is told in the preface to this volume.

Because I hope you will read the novella, I won't recap the story, although this site does a good job of doing so. This review is by Australian expatriate Geoff Pound, then living in the United Arab Emirates. 

Ismail Kadare is my father's age and lives now in France and continues to write and publish in French. I will be looking for more of his work, as the writing is lovely, even at he confronts the brutality of humanity.

Canada: Beggar Maid, The (Alice Munro)

The first book of this project turned out to be The Beggar Maid, by this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature, Alice Munro. While not about Canada, this work takes place in Canada, with cameo appearances by the Toronto Train Station and Vancouver, B.C. and an entire episode in the town of Powell River, where the topography of the town itself matters. There are also brief mentions of Yellowknife and Yukon gold fields. Most of the work is set in fictional locales West Hanratty and Hanratty (west is "wrong side of the tracks"), Ontario.

While not about the geography of a place, this collection of closely linked stories is the geography of a mid-century Canadian woman's mental voyage, from childhood to middle age, told in the third person. We follow Rose from extreme youth on the poor side of town, which is just how life is - don't feel sorry for us, through the opportunities offered through education. She starts with a profound awareness of herself as a separate being, even as a child. Her education is less about growing self-awareness than it is about growing awareness that one can be an individual and also connected with others. For many of the tales, the two perspectives seem to be in tension although there are moments of resolution, when self and interpersonal connections are allowed to co-exist and even do so with joy.

The notion of the story is critical, both as a literary form and within the stories themselves, as story-telling plays an important role in how Rose forms and expresses her deep feelings about the world around her. She apprehends her world more through sensibility than sense, to borrow Austen's phrase.

I've grown up with tales of my own mother's life, of people's progress from rural and poor to less rural and less poor, and--oh what a wonder--free to make choices based on preference and possibly circumstance, less driven by what must be done to endure, to survive. One key difference, however, is the accepted rough brutality of Rose's childhood home (including, in order of appearance in Rose's awareness, child abuse, rape, "tribal beating" of a neighboring bad father, and bullying by school peers). 

The details in Munro's work are sharp and true.  Here is just one of the many passages I marked:

"For breakfast, they too had tea and porridge. Puffed Rice in the summertime. The first morning the Puffed Rice, light as pollen, came spilling into the bowl, was as festive, as encouraging a time as the first day walking on the hard road without rubbers [rainboots] or the first day the door could be left open in the lovely, brief time between frost and flies. (p. 41)"

I particularly love that last bit about the open door.

Another telling detail includes the fact that if you matter to Rose, you have a first name, and only a first name. If you are a secondary character, you have first and last names. Some characters have only a role, such as "Head Librarian" or "U.C. minister."  It is interesting to note the switches in the name game with regard to Patrick, who appears in the keystone story "The Beggar Maid."  I am really trying to avoid spoilers here.

Have you read The Beggar Maid, or any of the freestanding stories within it that appeared in the late 1970s in Viva, The New Yorker, Redbook or elsewhere?  What did you think?