The Palace of Dreams

So people dream, right. So clearly, the best thing to do for the state, especially a state as fragmented and therefore as dependent on unity as the Ottoman empire ca 1840, is to collect those dreams, analyse them and collate them so you know what your underlings are up to. It's easily done, people are only too happy to share their dreams, and will even complain if you ignore their dreams.

So you have a huge palace in the centre of the capital where thousands of people work on these dreams, selecting them, analysing them, and every Friday presenting one Master Dream to the sultan so he knows what's going on in his empire and can make decisions.

So you start working there as the runt of the litter of a powerful family, and you have no idea show more what you're doing, but that's OK because you can always look at old interpretations of dreams so you know what to write.

Then again, who's to say if a dream interpretation is correct? Some rumours even say that the master dreams are completely fake. But that can't be true, because if that's true, who really holds the power? Especially when there are rumblings out in the Balkan provinces, and the entirety of Albania, for instance, seems to not have slept a wink in a year? Better make sure to find a good master dream, and act swiftly. Dreams can come true, like the song says.

My 2014 edition says "In these days of media surveillance, Kadare's novel hardly appears less relevant than when it was written in Albania in 1981."

Oh, sweet summer child. Hashtag fake news. show less

I was browsing the library shelves when I came across this book. It was clear from the blurb that I had to read it - an allegory for Soviet totalitarianism that centres around dreams! Just my sort of thing. Indeed, it is a beautiful and subtle form of dystopia. I read the whole short novel in a single sitting and was very impressed by it. The atmosphere reminded me somewhat of [b:The Unconsoled|40117|The Unconsoled|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342193138s/40117.jpg|6372970], especially when the protagonist Mark-Alem was lost in corridors.

The novel is set in a monolithic latter-day Ottoman empire that has a complex bureaucracy for monitoring and analysing the population’s dreams. The empire’s rulers believe, or show more wish to be seen to believe, that from dreams future events can be discerned. Mark-Alem, scion of an old family whose political power has waxed and waned, starts a job at the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams. Mark-Alem provides a striking point of view, as he is collaborating in a gigantic system of surveillance and control that he fears and cannot understand. Yet he is within it and this gives him power. The novel does not condemn him, rather it invites the reader to sympathise with his actions despite him being complicit in a terrible system. This ambivalence is beautifully evoked.

Although the use of dreams in the novel could have been intended to be purely allegorical, I very much enjoyed it on a literal level. Dreams have always been a fascination of mine. I liked the depiction of Mark-Alem’s absorption into dreams, such that when he takes a day off he is struck by how pallid and uninteresting the waking world is.

This part from page 127 was especially appealing:

’”Do you see what I mean? No history book, no encyclopedia, not all the holy tomes or suchlike put together, nor any school or university or library could supply the truth about the world in so concise and complete a form as these archives.”

“But isn’t that truth rather distorted?” Mark-Alem ventured to ask.

The archivist’s smile looked even more ironic in profile than it would have done seen full-face.

“Who can say it’s not what we see with our eyes open that is distorted, and that what’s described here isn’t the true essence of things?”

A library of dreams stretching back centuries, classified into categories as you would books! What a gorgeous and alarming thought, as well as a neat analogy for the files of the NKVD et al. show less

Kadare's metaphor for a monolithic police state and its workings. Set in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire--I figured this out from several subtle hints in the novel--along with elements from the late 20th century, this novel tells of a young man, Mark Alem, who is employed by the Palace of Dreams, the author's surreal intelligence agency, where dreams from all over the empire are collected, sorted, interpreted, with an eye to discovering which might be a "Master-Dream" pointing to a possible coup or other upheaval in the State. When one is discovered, the sultan's secret police can nip a possible plot in the bud and do away with any perpetrators. Mark Alem starts out in the Selection Department and passes along a file containing show more what he feels might be a possibly incriminating dream: a wasteland filled with garbage, a musical instrument, a rampaging bull, and a bridge. When he is promoted to the Interpretation Section, he is faced with the very same dream. We don't know his final interpretation, but agents from the Master Dream Section become very busy....

A chilling and nightmarish novel, reminiscent of Kafka--the claustrophobic, labyrinthine corridors of the Palace are evoked frighteningly. Mark-Alem must find his way from one department to another alone, hoping for help. On his day off, he notices how pale and insipid the real world has become as compared with the inner lives of people in the Palace. Atmospheric.

Very highly recommended. I'd advise reading the author's Three-Arched Bridge first if possible to get some backstory. show less

"The Palace of Dreams" is a fascinating novel and one of those that begs for discussion. Kadare creates a story immersed in an ominous but unidentified threat. Along the way, the author asks the reader to ponder many themes: fate, the nature of reality, national identity, and, of course, dreams. A seemingly simple tale engenders almost endless possibilities. The reader is unlikely to view dreams in the same way again. A simple but incredibly creative idea for a novel. An easy and very rewarding read from a gifted author.

“The idea behind the Sovereign’s creation of the Tabir (Palace of Dreams) is that Allah looses a forewarning dream on the world as casually as He unleashes a flash of lightning or draws a rainbow or suddenly sends a comet close to us, drawn from the mysterious depths of the Universe. He dispatches a signal to the earth without bothering about where it will land; He is too far away to be concerned with such details. It is up to us to find out where the dream has come to earth - to flush it out from among millions, billions of others, as one might look for a pearl lost in the desert. For the interpretation of that dream, fallen like a stray spark into the brain of one out of millions of sleeper, may help to save the country or its show more Sovereign from disaster; may help to avert war or plague or to create new ideas.”

Dreams, the surreal stories garnered from sleep, from the edge of death itself, do not belong to the dreamer but to the State. And it is in the Palace of Dreams that these dreams are reviewed, interpreted, and filed. Thousands upon thousands of dreams are stored within the Palace walls and each one is pored over carefully. And woe is the dreamer whose dream is chosen as the master-dream.

Though Mark-Alem, son of a noble family and recent employee at the Palace, is the main protagonist in the story, it was the Palace itself that was at the heart of the story. Kadare gave substance to this mysterious and sinister place and though I probably will forget about Mark-Alem in a few months the Palace will remain with me for a long time.

Another fine Kadare book though more surreal than the earlier ones I’ve read. show less

Pallati i Ëndrrave” është një nga romanet thelbësore të Ismail Kadaresë, me frymën e epikës, të cilën letërsia europiane e quante të shteruar: me njëmbëdhjetë romane, - titujt kryesorë të të cilëve po përkthehen herë pas here, vepra e tij vazhdimisht ka qenë në listën e kandidaturave për çmimin “Nobel”, në emër të letërsisë së Shqipërisë. Ai do ta meritonte atë çmim edhe sikur të kishte shkruar vetëm “Pallati i Ëndrrave”, si hipotezë mbi historinë e vërtetë të viktimave të vrasjeve të mëdha ose mbi atë pagjumësi kolektive që perandoria otomane nuk mund të tolerojë.

This police-state parable, set in a reimagined Ottoman empire, is bloodless enough that the Hoxha regime almost overlooked it, belatedly dropping the banhammer with 20,000 copies already in the wild. The titular institution is a version of Kafka's Castle (though less fiendish and less funny), a bureaucratic maze dedicted to sifting the nocturnal reveries of the Empire for subversive symbols. There's one dramatic incident late on, but otherwise we follow our nonentity of a protagonist as he blithely navigates the Party apparatus, inadvertently getting his illustrious family into a spot of bother. The plot touches briefly on the tradition of the Balkan rhapsodes and there's some Slav/Turk/Albanian ethnic tension which is interesting, but show more this novel is slight and bland in comparison to other suppressed Iron Curtain satires like Kundera's The Joke or Jiří Gruša's The Questionnaire. show less