By Sazan Goliku

KADARE AS A PERSONAGE
Notes about the novel “Hostages of peace”
of the writer Shefki Hysa

I met Ismail Kadare by chance one of the days he was in Tirana. During the conversation I said to him that “a writer has published a novel about you”. He was glad of course, but he is not accustomed to immediate expression of his feelings. Nothing moved in his face. He just said: “He had to ask me first”.

But I wanted to justify someway the writer and explain myself theoretically. So I said to him: “It isn’t a biographic book, like the other books that are written for the well-known personalities of the different fields such as science, culture, politics, sport… He has written a novel and you are a personage in that novel, the protagonist of the book. Is it necessary to ask for an authorization when you want to create a personage and the prototype is alive?

It seemed that Kadare sneered. I was showing the fields to the father. He has walked in that furrow for a long time.

In a press conference with the intellectuals of Tirana, Ismail Kadare answered in this way the question about this novel: “…Even though it has discovered some of my privacies, the novel is very nicely written, especially the part for the autumn of 1990.”

The novel of the writer Shefki Hysa “Hostages of peace” was welcomed by the readers, but even by the literary critique, so the author saw it reasonable to republish it revised.

A question rises while reading this novel: What kind of typology does it belongs to? Is it an adventurous, a feuilleton, a picaresque or simply a biographic novel? The author, despite his attempts to remain realist till the end, has been able to entwine elements of these types of novels, without being identified with any of them. This is one of the secrets of the typological and compositional originality of this novel.

The main topic of the book is the rapport of the writer and the man with the dictatorship, which suppresses and deforms the consciousness of individuals and personalities, who create protective shells to exist but it arouse in them even the rebellion spirit. The fact that the two personages where are based the triggers of the subject evolution are two teenagers, two artists, two adorers that are in love with the art of Kadare is significant as well as motivated from the mental and psychological aspect. Very young, with the intuition and the desire to discover and congratulate on every new contemporary and modern element in the literature and art but also with the dispositions and the mentality that differs a little from the official mentality of the dictatorship that professed itself as Marxist, those two guys personify the gemmae of a new liberal spirit even though it isn’t expressed in an explicit way because of the high-risk conditions, especially in the province.

The complexity of the figure of Kadare as a writer and man is the base of the shocking dramatization of the novel. This feature is explained and analyzed by the judgments and the estimations of the two guys, the different intellectuals, the party and state representatives and also through the creation and the recreation of the significant scenes and situations, too much fragile and in the ambit of a possible tragedy. The views from which the writer is investigated are antipodal:

The security men and the employees view him as an enemy (“We know what you deserve but we can’t do anything to the one who is above us!”), while the teenagers and the intellectuals with a free spirit and a democratic thinking consider him as “the unique hope” but they are also sorry for the debts that the writer has to pay to the regime to survive and write his real works.

The succinct structure of this laconic novel is gestated with vital and conventional components, with an absurd atmosphere and an existential weigh, with dreams and the immediate moment when you wake up, with documentation almost chronic and with a trivial and hyperbolic reflection. These contradictory structural elements form a flowing rainbow in the reader’s contemplative imagination and especially the reader that has enjoyed the sublimity of the Kadere art.

While reading the last pages of the roman, the ancient idea that every creator, is a man and remains such, provokes me.

When the historical-literary studies will sift and point out the books of the last decade of the century that we are leaving behind, I think that the hand of the studier of Kadare will stand even over this interesting novel.

Translated by: Dr. Haim Reitan