3:AM Magazine

By Anna Aslanyan.

The Accident, Ismail Kadare (tr. by John Hodgson), Canongate 2010

There is nothing extraordinary in solving a problem that is known to have a solution. It takes a real genius to tackle one for which no solution may exist. A whole generation of Soviet scientists grew up with this maxim and, one could say, not entirely to their disadvantage. It seemed to work on different levels, both as a creative motto and as an existential modus operandi. And it is certainly worth keeping in mind when reading The Accident, the latest book by Ismail Kadare to appear in English.

The author, who left Albania in 1990 after being granted political asylum in France where he still lives, won the Man Booker International Prize in 2005. An émigré who writes in his native language must realise that his work will be judged twice: not only by his fellow countrymen, but also by people reading it in translation. Does it affect Kadare’s style? It is hard to tell, especially because English editions of his books used to be translated from the French until recently. However, The Accident does not come across as an “export” volume – John Hodgson, who worked with the Albanian original, never imposes himself on the reader; his translation is subtle and manages to preserve the text in its entirety.

The novel starts with a question the eponymous accident raises: why did a taxi carrying a man and a woman to the Vienna airport suddenly lose control, killing its passengers? The opening part of the book, written in the dry language of a police report, states the facts: the pair were lovers, both Albanian, he an expert on Balkan affairs working for the Council of Europe, she an intern at an Austrian institute. The driver cannot explain what happened, claiming only that he was struck by something he saw in the rear-view mirror: “They were trying to kiss.” Intelligence services, both Albanian and Serbian, show an interest in the “unclassifiable accident,” possible versions including a political assassination, a murder, and a suicide pact.

It is only when an anonymous researcher begins to reconstruct the events leading to the tragedy that the novel really starts. The researcher uses his imagination to write the story of the victims, Besfort Y. and Rovena St., as told by themselves. This is not the first time Kadare resorts to a many-voiced narrative – he did it in The Successor to describe the circumstances surrounding the death in 1981 of the Albanian leader Mehmet Shehu. This time, however, his approach is more powerful, bringing a more convincing (if you hold imagination in high esteem) and, at the same time, less conclusive result. But then again, we are, perhaps, faced with the problem that deserves our attention for the very reason of being unsolvable.

The more the researcher delves into the past, the more complex his questions become as he traces the lives of his subjects. Besfort, who may have been instrumental in the bombing of Yugoslavia, is as controversial a figure as one would expect to find in Kadare’s book. His recurring nightmare is that of being summoned to the Hague – even a visit to a sex club evokes in him an image of a tear-stained woman holding a document with the seal of the International Tribunal. Eventually he concludes that “if he were summoned, he would not obey the court order, but only his own conscience. Every person should come to the Hague, as though it were an agency of Hades. Each for the sake of his own soul.”

The idea of collective guilt has often been criticised by those self-righteous hard-liners who think their views alone make them above it. But when we are shown pictures of blood spattered children, our first reaction is not to ask if they were killed by NATO bombs or Albanian knifes. We are more likely to scream with the heroine. Although Rovena may not possess the same dimensionality as the male protagonist, one would be mistaken to discard her as a mere beauty, a man’s favourite toy. Besfort, who might be seen as a despotic force in their relationship, is not what his younger lover accuses him of: “He had been her liberator, but this was not the first time in history that a liberator had been taken for a tyrant, just as many a tyrant had been taken for a liberator.”

Another question the hero keeps asking himself becomes central in the story – “the familiar doubt as to whether love really exists, or is merely a sick, over-the-rainbow fantasy, a new phantasm that has appeared on our planet only in the last five or six thousand years.” It is this, and not the feeling of guilt, that makes Besfort redeemable.

There are pages in the book that might surprise those who think of Kadare as a product of the “socialist realism” literary school. After all, the author studied at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow back in the 1950s, when Albania was an ardent supporter of all things Soviet. However, nothing in The Accident reminds you of the kind of realism usually associated with that milieu. Is Kadare turning to magical realism? Trying to write a classical whodunit? Do his ambiguous relations with the communist regime and his support of the Kosovan people relate to the story in any way? Some glimpses of modern Albania, where “since the fall of communism […] everything had gone to extremes: money, luxury, lesbian groups” are, of course, there to reflect the author’s views. The picture of his country Kadare paints in a few strokes is vivid and he manages to create an atmosphere of the post-communist epoch without reducing the narrative to a treatise on Balkan affairs. And yet, the main strength of the book, this fine specimen of a contemporary European novel, lies elsewhere – namely, in the ability of “the researcher” (or, indeed, the reader) himself to ask questions and seek answers.

Does love exist? This theme, and not the political intrigue, grows more and more urgent as the story progresses. After all, the same question is never applied to politics. In the final chapters, the researcher arrives at the conclusion that “there are other truths, beside those which we think we see,” and makes what appears an irrational but, to him, the only possible decision. If his will is to be executed, in a thousand years time posterity may learn the answers to the questions asked in the book, whether they exist or not.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Aslanyan is a translator and journalist living in London. She regularly contributes to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and writes for the TLS and a number of online publications. Anna’s translations into Russian include works of fiction by Tom McCarthy, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Mavis Gallant and Zadie Smith.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.