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Cover Image

The concert

by Kadare, Ismail.

Format: Print Book 1998
Availability: Available at 1 Library 1 of 1 copy

Available (1)
Location Collection Call #
CLP - Main Library First Floor - Fiction Stacks FICTION Kadare,
Location  CLP - Main Library
 
Collection  First Floor - Fiction Stacks
 
Call Number  FICTION Kadare,
 
 

Summary
THE CONCERT is Ismail Kadare's most complete and devastating portrayal of totalitarian rule and mentality. Set in the period when the alliance between Mao's China and Hoxha's Albania was going sour, this brilliant novel depicts a world so sheltered and monotonous that political ruptures and diplomatic crises are what make life exciting.
Published Reviews
Booklist Review: "The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare is a great writer, and The Concert is a masterpiece of realistic magical fiction. Concerned with little, seemingly out-of-the-way Albania's split with China in the early 1970s, it displays Kadare's uncanny skill in transmuting the recondite terrain of his fiction into the stage for action of universal interest. At the novel's center is an Albanian family whose members are part of the ruling elite: Gjergi works in the foreign ministry, his wife, Silva, as a secretary in another ministry, and her brother Arian is an army officer in disgrace for disobedience. As the novel unfolds, Kadare introduces other characters, including Mao, Chou En-lai, an unnamed radio surveillance technician charged with surveying the world's radio traffic, European revolutionaries, and Albanians from all levels of society, in a plot too rich to admit of easy synopsis. Suffice it to say that Albania falls out with China; Mao grows senile, rambles incoherently, and finally dies; Albanians try to cope with the Chinese and are relieved when they leave; and Arian becomes a hero when it is disclosed that he had disobeyed Chinese-inspired orders. ~--John Shreffler"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Set in the mid-1970s, as the alliance between Albania and Communist China unravels, this subversively inventive satire traces the impact of the zigzagging Albanian party line on the personal lives of a group of friends and associates. These include a jittery Albanian diplomat in Beijing, his jealously insecure wife, an establishment novelist who confronts ``the void inside him'' and a civil servant who writes an ``autocritique'' castigating himself for his petty-bourgeois mentality. A Kafkaesque subplot concerns an army officer who's arrested, apparently for refusing to obey an order. Albanian novelist Kadare ( The Palace of Dreams ), who lives in France, sketches a devastating portrait of Mao Zedong as a megalomaniac whose goal is ``the brainwashing of the human race.'' Historical figures like Zhou Enlai and genocidal Cambodian leader Pol Pot appear intermittently in an elliptic narrative spliced with dreams, officers' coerced confessions and short-short stories. China, depicted as a dystopia where simple human relations are stultified and surveillance is a way of life, becomes a mirror image of Albania through Kadare's mordantly ironic vision. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved"
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
Subjects Albania -- Fiction.
China -- Fiction.
Publisher New York :Arcade Pub. :1998
Distributed by Little, Brown and Co.,
Edition 1st Arcade pbk. ed.
Other Titles Concert.
Contributors Vrioni, Jusuf.
Bray, Barbara.
Language English
Description 443 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN 1559704152
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