Ismail Kadare's `The Concert'
One autumn afternoon in Tirana, Albania, a delivery man brings in a tub branches of a lemon tree at the house of diplomatic envoy Gjergj DIbre. His wife Silva asks the man to put the tree on the balcony. Gjergj, who is not home for their daughter Brikena's birthday, is traveling on the night plane from Paris to Peking with a letter in a briefcase. Silva is exhausted as she is expecting guests for the birthday celebration.
"A lemon tree is all I needed," she thinks.
"A lemon tree is all I needed," she thinks.
In the final chapter of Ismail Kadare's `The Concert' (1988) Silva looks at the little plant tenderly as she thinks about the world which was full of political meetings, plots, commotions, and tragedies, while in its little corner of the balcony, careless of everything else, the lemon tree devoted itself to its own raison d'etre -bringing forth fruit. Compared with the tumult going on in the world as a whole, it seemed so frail, so lonely you couldn't help pitying it. She smiles thoughtfully."Perhaps the lemon tree, if it had been able to think, would have pitied the rest of the world."
"The political meetings, plots, commotions and tragedies" which play out under a totalitarian rule is what `The Concert' is all about. Through the meditations, musings and reveries of the characters, we transit through a time in Albania's history when its ties with China was deteriorating. It was the period of chairman Mao's death and arrest of his wife Jiang Qing along with some of her cronies...The story of Victor Hila (as mentioned in the previous blog) who gets into a mess after he steps on the foot of a Chinese diplomat is but a strand in the plot. The book is made of several such macabre strands. For instance, after Mao's death, Albanian students are sent back home for allegedly behaving improperly towards Chinese girls, not to mention whole sectors of activity coming to a grinding halt, like the steel complex as the Chinese men working there return home.
'The Concert' is a surreal and comical work which delves into the mystery that is China. I felt the flow petering out in the middle before picking up.
Kadare’s The General of the Dead Army was hailed as a masterpiece. But I chose The Concert ahead of the General pulled by its satire and its similarity, which I felt, to Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say…It was said that he has been compared to Kafka and Orwell. Such comparison seems to me to be ill-advised which would amount to being unfair to both sides. Furthermore, Kafka belongs to a completely different class (and incomparable), while Orwell’s writing, I agree with some critics, is mixed up with pamphleteering, though today his relevance cannot be overlooked...
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Albania Today: From one extreme to the other?
Albanian Church to celebrate martyrs' legacy on Nov 5.
https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/11/02/albanian-church-celebrate-martyrs-legacy-nov-5/
Kadare’s The General of the Dead Army was hailed as a masterpiece. But I chose The Concert ahead of the General pulled by its satire and its similarity, which I felt, to Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say…It was said that he has been compared to Kafka and Orwell. Such comparison seems to me to be ill-advised which would amount to being unfair to both sides. Furthermore, Kafka belongs to a completely different class (and incomparable), while Orwell’s writing, I agree with some critics, is mixed up with pamphleteering, though today his relevance cannot be overlooked...
--------------
Albania Today: From one extreme to the other?
Albanian Church to celebrate martyrs' legacy on Nov 5.
https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2016/11/02/albanian-church-celebrate-martyrs-legacy-nov-5/
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