A Horseman for the Headless: On Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Traitor’s Niche’
1978 was a good year for Albanian literature, if not for Albania. Its great man of letters, Ismail Kadare, released two books. Kadare is best known for his pitch-black humor, authentic to the painful saga of Balkan history, and for winning the inaugural International Man Booker prize in 2005. It was two years after his country’s Third Republic era had commenced in 1976, when readers of the Albanian language devoured his pair of linked historical novels, Three-Arched Bridge, and The Traitor’s Niche.
It was a time fraught with anxiety over the erasure of recorded time, as the infamous Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha instituted a new constitution in 1976 further enforcing the destruction of the multi-faith establishment that had been part of the small nation’s contested ancient Illyrian legacy, bloodstained by some five centuries of Ottoman occupation. According to atheist state law, preaching was a crime punishable by up to ten years in prison. Other such crimes were inconceivable beyond the isolationist government that ended in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall lifted the Iron Curtain.
At the cusp of that epochal paradigm shift, Kadare chose exile in France, where he has lived out his golden years, since becoming a global voice who defends the artistic integrity of literature foremost over its political import. Yet, it is difficult to read his works without identifying certain critical parallels to the times in which he lived and wrote. Forty years is effective in relaying the creative naturalism of his informal, though skillfully poetic, idiosyncratic tone. The complexity and sharpness of Kadare’s sentences are delivered with a powerful candor by Hodgson, an English writer and professor who also translated . It is the case that Kadare is an artful literary writer, a quintessential prose stylist, leading to his brushes with Nobel candidacy.
