Book 153: Albania (English) The File on H (Ismail KADARE)

That shadowy smile that the governor had thought full of meaning returned to their faces. Hm, now they’re making fun of us openly, he thought. They’re definitely trying to have us on. How could you believe that they were really looking for a solution to the mystery of Homer in a small town that had never had any connection whatsoever with the poet? Couldn’t they have found a more plausible excuse for coming? But even on that score they didn’t seem to have made much of an effort. Provincials, they must have thought, peasants living in a backwater… Ha! We shall see who has the last laugh! You two may have seen all sorts of things, the governor continued, talking to himself while maintaining his unwavering smile, you may have looked at skyscrapers and suchlike things of that kind, but what you’ve never met before is Dull Baxhaja.

Albania was my favourite discovery on my epic Eastern European voyage (it seems even other Europeans are frightened of visiting there, like Han Chinese to Xinjiang, so it was beautiful, hospitable, and blessedly untouristed!), and Kadare was one of my favourite author discoveries from this virtual voyage – I’ve since read his Palace of Dreams and Broken April, and loved all of them).

Two Irish-American anthropologists come to 1930s Albania, where epic story-telling still survived, with newly-invented tape recorders to try to determine whether the epics of Homer (’H’) could have been orally transmitted in a similar fashion. (Freezing them on tape is the equivalent of Homer immortalising them in writing). (And yes, Virginia, there was a Homer). But the governor doesn’t believe this and thinks they must be spies. So begins an Innocents Abroad comedy of errors.

The xenophobic locals are very mistrustful of the newcomers. (When I visited a couple of years ago, alongside the incredible friendliness there was concrete evidence of more recent paranoia scattered all over the country, in the form of miniature mushroom-shaped bunkers built under Hoxha’s Communist regime). The provincials set themselves to spying on the ‘spies’. Who is studying who?

I’d always wondered what the ‘subjects’ thought of the anthropologists who come to study them and wished they could have written their own ‘studies’ or at least stories of what they thought of the scientists, it would be so fascinating!

I thought this was a brilliant combination of humour and serious ethnographic study of a dying tradition was absolutely brilliant. Kadare immediately shot up to being one of my favourite authors.                                                                                                                                                                                                    

KADARE, Ismail (1936 – ), The File on H = Dosja H, translated from French by David BELLOS, London, Vintage, 2006, ISBN 9780099497196

First published in Albanian 1981