The exile
The Exile (Original title: E penguara: rekuiem për Linda B. ) is a novel by Ismail Kadare published in Albanian in 2009 .
Kadare dedicated the book to "Albanian girls who were born in exile, grew up and became women."
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It tells the story of the young Albanian playwright Rudian Stefa, who lived and wrote in Tirana in the mid-1980s . A few days after he had an argument with his lover Migena and beat her, he was summoned to the party committee - for no reason. He wonders whether he has to justify himself because of the violence against the young woman or because of his last play, which had not yet been approved. During the interrogation he learns that it concerns a young woman who had committed suicide and in whose possession a book with a personal dedication by Stefa was found. The deceased came from a family that had been interned far away from Tirana as a politically persecuted person .
Stefa remembers that Migena asked him for this dedication. During the next few chapters he regrets his act of violence, regrets that he has not heard from Migena and wants to learn more about the dead woman. To do this, he even gets in touch with the investigator, a Sigurimi officer, who probably tells him a lot about the background out of admiration. It is becoming increasingly clear to Stefa how far the surveillance of the people in Stalinist Albania goes. In his despair over the uncertainty of how his play and Migena will continue, his psychological situation deteriorates more and more.
Migena comes back into his life and gradually she can bring herself to tell him what happened. Linda was her classmate and best friend in Gramsh . As an internee, she should not have left the country town, which tormented her because in her imagination she fell hopelessly in love with Rudian. A plan to get to the capital anyway, where she wanted to give herself to Rudian, did not work out. She was very happy about the book with a dedication. That her best friend was having an affair with her lover was a shock. She tried to process the news that she heard during the graduation ball in a special way: Migena was supposed to transfer Rudian's feelings onto her by kissing her and touching her chest. The girls were caught exchanging initia- tives and derided as homosexuals throughout the town . Out of shame and with no hope of prospects that her situation could change while her friend would study in the capital and leave her alone, Linda killed herself shortly afterwards.
Stefa got worse and worse - he felt drawn to Linda. He asked his psychiatrist if there were any countries where a dead person could be married. He did not see Migena again.
Further chapters describe a meeting of the unnamed Enver Hoxhas with his private secretary. The aged head of state can be informed about what is going on in the country. Among other things, the secretary reports on the investigations into the dissolute events at the prom in Gramsh and reads from the psychiatrist's notes on Stefa. In the following, Hoxha gossiped about the confused artists in a chat with party officials, but explained that they were under his protection.
The last pages deal with the overthrow of the communist regime in Albania in 1991. Linda's parents are finally allowed to leave their place of internment. They take their exhumed daughter with them on the trip to Tirana . In Tirana, after a theater premiere, like Migena, they meet Rudian Stefa, from whom they want a dedication for Linda.
Reviews
On Deutschlandfunk , Kadare was praised for how he conveyed the atmosphere in the surveillance state "with a sense of absurd comedy" . The integration of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice is considered unsuccessful in this review by Andrej Klahn. The Guardian , however, judges that Kadare has succeeded in combining the great tragedy with the grotesque .
translation
The German translation by Joachim Röhm will be published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2017 .
expenditure
- Ismail Kadare: E penguara: rekuiem për Linda B. Onufri, Tirana 2009.
- Ismail Kadare: A Girl in Exile . Harvill Secker, London 2016.
- Ismail Kadare: The Exiled . Fischer-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2017.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ismail Kadare: The Exiled . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2017, ISBN 978-3-10-038416-4 , pp. 5 (for a detailed discussion of this, Joachim Röhm on p. 205 ff.).
- ↑ Andrej Klahn: Ismail Kadare: "The Banished" - surveillance at every turn . In: Deutschlandfunk . August 17, 2017 ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed November 4, 2017]).
- ^ Ian Sansom: A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare review - learning to live with the dead . In: The Guardian . March 19, 2016 ( theguardian.com [accessed November 4, 2017]).
- ↑ "The Banished" at fischerverlage.de, accessed on July 23, 2017