This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.
A powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That is the burning question. The man who died by his own hand, or another's, was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before Shehu was to assume power, he was found dead. The Successor is simultaneously a mystery novel, a historical novel-based on actual events and buttressed by the author's private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu, and a psychological novel. How do you live when nothing is sure?… (more)
This novel looks at the murder? assassination? of the Successor--the second in power--in Albania, during the communist years. Few names are named. There is his wife, his daughter, her fiance, the Guide, the Architect, and so forth. Based on the death of Mehmet Shehu in 1981.
This was interesting, but slow and a bit dull. ( )
It was the announced pasing of Kim Jong Il that prompted my reading, a belated one of sorts as I've always found a welcome tumult in Kadare's novels. The jutapoisiton with North Korea is functional in as I know so little about its shadowed pratices. Perhaps that is the point. This is a remarkable tale, one which seethes and whsipers leaving the reader shuddering at political reality and swooning in the wake of such sweet prose. ( )
The impact and causes of the murder/suicide of the successor to a totalitarian leader. Didn't really do anything for me, a new author I was very happy to come across. ( )
Typical treatise dealing with the subtle workings of power and fear in a communist dictatorship like Albania. So why only three stars for this Nobel Prize winner? It is not for want of insight. Because Kadare knows his stuff. It is the style of writing which is a combination of a narrator telling a lengthy story and a southern European style of writing, which I would characterise as terse, wieldy, lacking in immediacy. The idea and plot of this novel is very good. The ordained successor to the ailing dictator is found dead at his palatial home. Was he killed in cold blood? Did he step out of line? Or did he commit suicide (the initial official reading)? And if so why, because rumour has it that he was on the verge of being rehabilitated. ( )
Scarily brilliant. A well thought out descent into despair, experienced from the earliest sense of disquiet as a river narrows, through the pell mell of the rapids, to the edge of the waterfall... to the nothingness beyond. ( )
The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.
Quotations
He took the view that crimes moved house with people, until they found walls within which they could hide.
The nature of such a bond was presumably still little understood, because it was too new. Unlike religious allegiances, it was in competition with the ties of clan and family, because it too was a tie of blood - but with a difference. It wasn't based on inner blood, the blood in your veins, identical to the blood of your family going back a thousand years, according to genetics, but on the other kind, on outer blood. That's to say, on the blood of others, blood they had drunkenly spilled in the name of Doctrine.
Where, as on some station platform or in an airport arrivals hall, the dead by the thousands stand around in little groups waiting for their nearest and dearest. Some are overwhelmed with longing to clasp in their arms those from whom they have been separated, but there are others who with sombre and resentful visage display their wounds, waiting for an explanation.
In past times, nobody ever felt certain of anything. You thought you were as white as snow, and then, without even knowing what you had done, you found you had been subjected to foreign influences. Or that you had been contaminated despite yourself by the wind of liberalism. It wasn't by chance they called them winds of ill fortune - you could get caught out by a diabolical draught anywhere you stood.
Last words
Otherwise, like those assassins who turn off their path to visit their first home, we might also make a detour and, pitiless and unrepentant, masked and bloodstained as we always were and always will be, we might return to bring you new misfortunes, sans amen.
A powerful political novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That is the burning question. The man who died by his own hand, or another's, was Mehmet Shehu, the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before Shehu was to assume power, he was found dead. The Successor is simultaneously a mystery novel, a historical novel-based on actual events and buttressed by the author's private conversations with the son of the real-life Mehmet Shehu, and a psychological novel. How do you live when nothing is sure?
)
)
Google Books — Loading...
(3.54)
Wikipedia in English
1
This was interesting, but slow and a bit dull. (