See my note at Siege mentality ( )

From Publishers Weekly
First published in Albania in 1970 and translated into French in the '90s, Kadare's (The Successor) beast of a novel traces a 15th-century Ottoman siege of a Christian citadel in Albania. Ugurlu Tursun Pasha is commander-in-chief of a vast number of Turkish infantry troops, cavalry, swordsmen and janissaries. From his pink pavilion on the plain, the pasha must vanquish the Albanians, who refuse to surrender. Readers meet several on the pasha's side during the bloody battles, including the rather hapless Mevla Çelebi, chronicler to the Ottomans, and the enlightened quartermaster general. Although there are few Albanian characters, Kadare, a Man Booker International Prize–winner and Nobel contender, crafts a story whose details add up to a glimpse into the soul of his own country. Kadare's metaphors leave no doubt that the novel is also an insightful commentary on life in late 1960s Albania, when the book was written. ( )

This is the first thing I’ve read by Kadare, but it will not be the last. This is a novel to be enjoyed on a number of levels.

It is, first, a wonderful description of an Ottoman army of tens of thousands of men besieging an Albanian fortress in the early part of the fifteenth century. The Pasha looks out on his army as it settles in: “He could see the different corps of the army laid out according to the plan that had been agreed….he could see the snow-white flags of the janissaries, and the copper cauldron they hung on top of a tall pole, the raiders, or akinxhis, were taking their horses to drink in the nearby stream. Further on lay the endless tents of the azabs, as the infantry units were called; beyond them were the tents of the eshkinxhis, the cavalry recruited for this campaign; then, further on still, the tents of the swordsmen known as dalkilc, then the quarters of the serden gecti, the soldiers of death, then the musluman or Muslim troops, and the prettier abodes of the sipahi, the regular cavalry. Spread out behind them were the Kurdish units, then the Persians, the Tartars, the Caucasians,and the Kalmyks, and, even further off, where the commander’s eye could no longer make out any clear shapes, there must have been the motley horde of the irregular volunteers, the exact number of whom was known to no man.” The battle scenes around various attempts to storm the fortress are very well done, you can hear the roar of cannon, the clash of steel, the clouds of arrows from both sides, the cries of men fighting, striving, straining, dying, you can feel the heat, the fear, the madness, the terror of men buried alive in a collapsed tunnel, you can smell the smoke, the sweat, the odor of burning flesh. Thus does Kadare describe the last, failed attempt to breach the fortress:

“Arrows rained down even more thickly. But the Pasha did not move away from the wall. Once again he cantered alongside the wall at whose foot what people call a “war” was taking place. On this occasion, it took the form of a human mass rising from below towards another mass of men overhead. Unseen like a demon behind a screen of smoke given off by pitch, the latter was doing all it could to prevent the former from climbing up. It was hitting it without mercy, setting it on fire, burning it to a cinder, chopping off hundreds of its arms and legs. But the rising mass did not falter or turn back. It went on rising, rung after rung, slipping on its own blood, clinging by its nails to the stone, and when its limbs were cut off, it instantly grew hundreds of new feet and new hands that sought only to go on going up and up…”

Life for the vast majority of the soldiers is short and hard and cheap, death comes quickly or slowly and painfully, but it is always imminent, it defines life more than life itself. And yet, all this hardship, all this struggle, all this sacrifice is ephemeral. As the chronicler notes: “To cap it all, these pages [of his chronicle] would also be the sole remnants of the myriad tents which, when they were dismantled, as they would be in a few weeks’ time, would leave thousands of marks on a wide empty space, looking as if it had been trampled by a huge herd of bizarre animals. Then, next spring, grass would grow on the plain: millions of blades of grass, utterly indifferent to what had gone on there, with no knowledge of all that can happen in this world.”

Largely through the personalities that lead them, Kadare describes the various structures of this huge army, the religious leader who strains against the Pasha’s military authority, the secret police who report daily on morale and who unearth and execute spies or at least those who fit the bill, the engineer who casts the cannons on the spot, the sappers, the infantry captains, the architect who directs the cannonading for maximum effect on the structure, the astrologer who foretells omens and pays with his life for wrong ones, the chronicler. A large cast of characters is drawn but we follow only a few in detail through the novel: the Pasha, the Quartermaster General, and the chronicler.

On another level, lest anyone think things have changed very much over six centuries, this novel depicts how people (men in this context) come together to pursue a grand vision or a grand enterprise in which necessary collaboration is tinged with all the strengths and weaknesses of individuals beset by ambition and fear of failure, petty jealousies, and struggles for power, acclaim and status. There is also the age-old struggle of tradition against modernity, personalized by the Mufti who believes men will fight harder with the proper religious fervor and control and who believes in omens and soothsayers versus the engineer who casts his cannons on the spot and puts his faith in the mathematics of trajectories that will smash cannon balls against the fortress or drop mortars over its walls.

There are other echoes too, when one thinks of the context of this novel written by an Albanian in 1969-1970 when Albania was still tightly in the grip of a communist regime. This is a novel about Albanian endurance and victory over an alien force despite seemingly overwhelming odds for the other side. The not-so-petty jealousies, the sense of sharks ready to regroup at any scent of blood, the secret police, the show trials, the unwarranted executions, the tension between the secular and the religious authorities (like the Soviet generals versus the commissars), all of these things would have resonated for people living under a communist regime. Most important in the position taken by the Quartermaster General who is a philosopher given to expounding on themes that terrify the poor chronicler in a world where challenging orthodoxy usually leads to a swift death, particularly the QG’s musings on the soul of a nation:

“We slave away down here spreading death and desolation, but the real fight is going on up there….You cannot call a country conquered until you have conquered its Heaven….Because just as folk hide their treasures in places that are hard to get at, so peoples and nations store their most precious assets in the heavens-----their divinities, their faith, all that they hold to be sublime and that nothing can alter…. things of a higher order, things that transcend the limits of human life, things that are sometimes roughly called apparitions, in a word, everything that has to do with the soul. One day or another we’ll take possession of their castles; we’re sure to overcome them in the end. But that won’t be enough. In the final analysis they’re just heaps of stones that can be taken from us in the same way we will take them ourselves. But victory in war is something altogether different….”

One little quibble: this is a double translation, i.e. from Albanian to French to English, and while I think the English is, for the most part very good, I doubt that a 15th century anyone would use the word, "metaform".