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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 089–104] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.89 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Book Reviews

An Award Heard Around the World? Ismail Kadare and the Inaugural 
Man Booker International Prize 

Emily O. Wittman, University of Alabama

Books under review:

Casanova, Pascale.  Th e World Republic of Letters.  Trans. Malcolm 
DeBevoise.  Harvard University Press.  Cambridge, MA, 2005. 440 
pp.  $35.00 hc.  ISBN 0-674-01345-X.

English, James F. Th e Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the 
Circulation of Cultural Value.  Harvard University Press.  Cambridge, 
MA, 2004. 432 pp. $29.95 hc. ISBN 0-674-01884-2.

Kadare, Ismael. Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories. Trans. 
David Bellos. Arcade Publishing. New York, 2006. 240 pp. $24.00 
hc. ISBN 1-559-70788-7.

Kadare, Ismael. Broken April. Ivan R. Dee. Chicago, 1998. 248 pp.  
$12.95 pb. ISBN 1-561-31065-4.  

Kadare, Ismael. Th e File on H. Trans. David Bellos and Jusuf Vrioni.  
Arcade Publishing. New York, 2002. 202 pp. $12.95 pb. ISBN 1-
559-70627-9. 

Kadare, Ismael. Th e Palace of Dreams. Trans. Barbara Bray and Jusuf 
Vrioni.  Arcade Publishing. New York, 1998. 204 pp. $12.95 pb.  
ISBN 1-559-70416-0.  

Kadare, Ismael. Th e Successor. Trans. David Bellos. Arcade Publishing.  
New York, 2006. 216 pp. $24.00 hc. ISBN 1-559-70773-9.

Th e new, London-based biennial Man Booker International Prize, like 
the Nobel Prize in Literature, is awarded to a living author—a stipula-
tion that excluded betting favorite Saul Bellow—of any nationality, for 
the global impact of his or her entire body of work. Th e international 

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prize is an answer to criticism of the parent award, the annual Booker 
prize, which is awarded only to citizens of the United Kingdom and 
the Commonwealth. Judged by a rotating international jury of three, 
the prize is open to any fi ction writer whose work appears either in 
English or in “generally available translation,” a restriction that elimi-
nated several possible candidates.

On June 2, 2005, the Albanian author Ismail Kadare won the inau-
gural prize.  Kadare, the author of more than thirty books since the ear-
ly sixties, has been translated into more than forty languages. Kadare 
himself does not speak English. He writes almost exclusively in Alba-
nian, a structurally rich, independent branch of the Indo-European 
family spoken by approximately six million people. Th e vast majority 
of his audience reads him in translation, typically out of chronological 
sequence, and with a time lag of years and sometimes decades. Most 
English-language translators work with authorized French versions, 
not the Albanian originals.

Kadare’s most recent U.S. publications include Agamemnon’s Daugh-
ter: A Novella and Stories (2006) and Th e Successor (2005). Th e Successor, 
written in 2002, is a fi ctional rendering of the circumstances and after-
math of the murderous or suicidal shot that killed long-time Albanian 
dictator Enver Hoxha’s chosen heir Mehmet Shehu in 1981. Th e pref-
ace to the novel alerts us that “any resemblance between the characters 
and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.”  
Th e Successor does not solve the mystery yet no rumor is left unspoken 
as Kadare deftly mixes the insider views of family members and co-
workers with the contents of foreign espionage dossiers, ambassadors’ 
reports and the mysterious musings of an Icelandic medium.  

Albanian confusion about the Successor’s death is intertwined with 
non-Albanian confusion about Albania, highlighting foreign interest 
in the country whose paranoid leadership progressively isolated it from 
every bloc and nation in the world.  Who lives in Albania? What are 
Albanians like? Non-Albanians ponder these questions in Th e Successor 
and in other Kadare novels, often without much insight: “What was 
known about Albania was mostly obsolete and some of it was distinctly 
romanticized” (5). Th e Successor off ers a smattering of tongue-in-cheek 

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beginner’s introductions to Albania that read like Wikipedia entries.  
Self-conscious asides, such as “as we say here,” pepper the novel, but 
the pedagogy is self-aware, often funny and strangely hospitable.

As the citizens of Albania read their morning papers, they ponder 
the ramifi cations of the Successor’s death, wondering “which of the 
two alternatives—self-infl icted death, or death infl icted by the hand 
of another—would aff ect them less harshly” (3). A similar concern 
haunts the novella Agamemnon’s Daughter, written ten years before Th e 
Successor, and smuggled piecemeal to France. Th e novella is situated in 
Tirhana at the time when the Successor is promoted, and it delves deep 
into the private ramifi cations of political events. It details the emo-
tional plight of the Successor’s daughter’s fi rst lover, as he realizes that 
her father’s position and promotion will require her to break with him, 
and make a politically strategic marriage. Mehmet Shehu did not have 
a daughter, but Enver Hoxha did, and many speculate that Suzana is 
based on her.  She appears in Th e Successor as well, as one of the rotating 
narrators who contemplate her father’s death.

Th e narrators of Th e Successor patiently explain the details and con-
text of the case. Th is is necessary in order for the novel to make sense to 
non-Albanian readers (and even some Albanian speakers living outside 
of Albania as well). Yet Th e Successor’s ambiguous ending hints that this 
is an impossible enterprise for everyone involved, including those at 
the epicenter. In a nod to Albania’s epic tradition, the dead Successor, 
speaking from an underworld of shades, is the novel’s fi nal narrator.  
He taunts readers by recalling a missed underworld opportunity to 
meet with Mao Tse-Tung’s equally ill-fated one-time heir Lin Biao: “To 
him, a man of my own kind, I could have told the story of what hap-
pened to me; but no way can I tell you. For unlike the language that 
serves for us to talk to one another, a language allowing our kind to 
communicate with yours has not yet been invented on earth, and never 
will be” (197). Perhaps a bit out of character, the Successor cautions 
readers not to resuscitate future Successors. “Don’t try to work out 
where we went wrong,” he warns (206). By invoking Lin Biao, he sug-
gests that his own story is neither unique nor geographically specifi c.  
Th e Successor is a member of a global clan of assassins; the harrowing 

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allegory of power is rooted in the Balkans but relevant to all readers.
In Th e Successor, the self-doubting architect who designed the Suc-

cessor’s house poses questions about internal and external evaluation 
of artistic integrity.  Th e architect, who might die for his fl oor plans, is 
spurred to conduct a frank assessment of his own talent and the artistic 
constraints posed by the dictatorship.  

I was probably one of the few who asked themselves the fateful ques-
tion:  Do I or do I not possess any talent?  Was it the age that had 
turned my hands into clay, or was I so clumsy that I would have veg-
etated no matter what period I lived in . . . Would I not have exclaimed 
and lamented in all and any age that I would have been a great artist 
but for Pharaoh Th utmose blocking my gifts, but for Caligula, but for 
McCarthy, but for Zhdanov. . .  (189)

Th e architect directs his self-critique at the bad faith implicit in his 
excuses and lamentations. But can aesthetic evaluation dispense with a 
look into the circumstances that may have stifl ed or inhibited creative 
work?  And how can the author’s relationship to these circumstances 
be judged? 

Two recent books published by Harvard University Press off er new 
angles and vocabulary with which to examine both Kadare’s writing 
and the Man Booker International Prize and perhaps answer the ar-
chitect’s questions.  Pascale Casanova’s Th e World Republic of Letters 
(2005) and James English’s Th e Economy of Prestige (2005) complement 
each other and read well in tandem, in part because each sidesteps the 
overt subject matter of the other—international literary competition 
for Casanova, and cultural prizes for English. Although neither book 
mentions Kadare (the prize was awarded following the publication of 
both books, and both authors miss a great case study), their concerns  
are both mirrored and complicated in Th e Successor and in Kadare’s 
larger corpus.

In Th e Economy of Prestige, James English notes the astonishing pro-
liferation of prizes in the arts, doubting, with an implied sigh, that “any 
of the business of culture can be conducted without recourse to them, 
not even the business of resisting their putative eff ects” (106).  If you 
tire of laments that Philip Roth has been passed over too many times, 

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take heart at English’s claim that “the most ambitious prizes are more 
and more obliged to reach beyond national boundaries both for object 
of esteem and for (other) sources of legitimacy” (261). Th is is true of 
judging committees as well, who grant awards legitimacy by provid-
ing “symbolic support from extranational sources” (260). Building on 
Foucault and Bourdieu’s conceptual vocabulary for aesthetic judgment, 
English demonstrates that symbolic capital has gone international but 
warns that this is not necessarily a gain for writers from smaller coun-
tries or literatures insofar as the awards typically favor exiled authors. 
Th e “international economy of prestige” is a mixed blessing (262). 
English reasons that exiled writers are often privileged in the prize 
game because they straddle worlds and are therefore more palatable to 
foreign judges who are often exiles themselves.  Unlike Casanova, Eng-
lish bemoans the loss of attention to the “symbolic importance of the 
local,” to writers who do not resemble critically acclaimed American 
or European writers and are included only to the extent that they can 
be “recontextualized for mainstream consumption” (291, 282). Like 
Casanova, English points out the strange temporality of consecration. 
Often, he notes, national recognition paradoxically follows interna-
tional consecration and thereby implicitly diminishes the importance 
of “indigenous cultural prestige” (272). Overall, “the recent frenzy of 
prizes and awards” has led not just to “denationalization,” but also to a 
“more radical deterritorialization of prestige, an uncoupling of cultural 
prizes . . . from particular cities, nations, even clearly defi ned regions.” 
(282). Th ese prizes reward “global” literature, “a literature whose fi elds 
of production and of reception could be mapped—and whose indi-
vidual works could be valued—only on a world scale” (304). Prizes 
reach beyond national boundaries, but they are in search of “world 
literature,” a category as much stylistic as geographic. Th e consecration 
of this category worsens the very situation the global prizes purport 
to correct. Although English does not address the important role of 
translation in the world of international literary prizes, his book is a 
valuable supplement to prize committee member Azar Nafi si’s refl ec-
tion that the prize itself is ultimately less important than “the debate 
and controversy it generates” (Nafi si 2005).

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In Th e World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova calls for literary 
critics to do more than contextualize writing within national history 
or evaluate it with purely aesthetic criteria.  Although these kinds of 
literary criticism have been unearthed and reburied for decades, Casa-
nova proposes new reasons to torch the crops.  She coins the term 
“literary temporality” to indicate the temporal history specifi c to lit-
erature and the term “world literary space” to indicate the geography 
specifi c to literature. Literature is an international experience for writ-
ers as well as readers, she argues, and this experience is more temporal 
then geographical or political, although it is necessarily infl uenced by 
both geography and politics (351). Literary scholars, critics and judges 
miss the point when they isolate texts from one another and ignore 
“the totality of texts and literary and aesthetic debates with which a 
particular work of literature enters into relation and resonance, and 
which forms the true basis for its singularity, its real originality” (3).  
Th e optic of “world literary space” and the temporality specifi c to it 
alone can illuminate individual texts and explode tired categories of 
infl uence and genius.

In Casanova’s account, Paris is the “literary Greenwich meridian,” 
the reference point for this literary temporality.  Th e World Republic of 
Letters describes the way in which Paris has traditionally maintained 
political and economical autonomy in the literary sphere, with French 
publishing houses nobly funding foreign translations based on merit, 
not marketability. Yet Casanova is also attuned to the dangers in the 
center of consecration. Most relevant to the case of Kadare is her at-
tention to the struggles of writers who work at the literary “periphery.”  
Outsiders, she claims, are much more aware of what success in the 
center means, as well as the available strategies to obtain it.  Th is power 
dynamic is often invisible to those who wield literary power even if—
like the Parisian publishers—they model themselves as a disinterested 
court of appeals. 

Casanova details how international literary space sprang out of six-
teenth-century debates over the merits of Latin and vernacular French 
for contemporary literature and drama. French became the interna-
tional vernacular language of conversation and literature, Casanova ar-

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gues, for non-coercive reasons; rather, “the exceptional concentration 
of literary resources that occurred in Paris over the course of several 
centuries gradually led to its recognition as the center of the literary 
world” (68, 47). Paris reinforced its literary capital in the form of pub-
lications, translations and prizes. Other countries sought to establish 
rival centers of consecration but failed because their methods were na-
tionalistic and coercive. Quick on the heels of the French, German-
language writers, inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder’s eighteenth-
century writing, sought cultural legitimacy by revisiting (or creating) 
national folk traditions. In Casanova’s account, this attempt to establish 
national literary independence led to anachronism and nationalistic 
stagnation, precisely because it favored nationalistic appropriation over 
a universal approach. Th e ends spoiled the means as German-language 
writers unwisely battled the invincible power of literary Paris, world 
republic of letters.

Like English, Casanova builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of con-
secration and symbolic capital, proposing that we investigate the cases 
of peripheral writers in view of two questions:  Where does the writer 
in question stand in relation to his native literary space? What is the 
place of this native literary space on the larger map of world literature? 
(41). She has questions for readers from the center as well. How do 
critics from the centers of the literary world—Paris, as well as other 
countries in which literature is relatively free from political restraints 
and economic woes—perceive writing from the periphery? Does the 
very criterion of universality that their central position presumably 
encourages critics to adopt, also blind them to the specifi city of the 
work in question or, conversely, push them to identify and privilege 
perceived diff erences? 

Born and raised in a small and isolated country, Kadare clearly stands 
in a diffi  cult relationship to world literary space. When reading Ka-
dare, it quickly becomes clear that he is acutely aware of the politics of 
literary recognition and threads this knowledge throughout his literary 
corpus.  Kadare’s 1997 novel Th e File on H. explicitly foregrounds the 
perils involved in identifying cultural authority and symbolic capital.  
In Th e File on H., two Harvard-educated Irish-American scholars learn 

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Albanian to conduct research into the contemporary oral narratives 
that they believe will provide insight into Homeric composition. Th e 
novel is based on a real series of visits by Harvard classicist Milman 
Parry and his doctoral student, Albert Lord, to the Balkans to study 
the oral epic tradition.  Parry and Lord recorded and analyzed oral 
epics in order to gain insight into the structure and delivery of the 
Homeric epics.  In 1979, a fortuitous meeting occurred between Lord 
and Kadare in Ankara, Turkey.  Kadare completed Th e File on H. the 
following year.

Arriving in Albania in the 1930s, the Homeric scholars ignore the 
present day country they encounter.  Th e Albanians they meet fathom 
neither the foreigners’ dogged search for illiteracy nor their antiquated 
notions about Albania; even the scholars’ Albanian is hopelessly out-
dated. Th e local soap merchant marvels that the duo has journeyed, 
“all the way to the end of the world to stay in a pigsty of an inn and 
try to fi nd out about a blind guy who lived a million years ago!” (33).  
When the scholars land in a remote town in search of traces of the 
bard, a gypsy readies himself to greet them with “an impressively long 
sequence of farts.” Th e local provincial governor mistakes them for 
spies, thereby launching an elaborate investigation that studies the 
visitors as carefully as the visitors study Albania. Th e ministry of the 
interior hopes to gather enough damning evidence to blackmail the 
scholars into writing a biography of the king.  

Th e scholars discover traces of Homer in modern Albania, but not 
in any foreseeable fashion. Th ey neither see nor hear the obvious; one 
scholar literally follows Homer into blindness. Ultimately, it is the 
lonely governor’s wife who best understands the mutual mispercep-
tions and situational farce, and prepares herself to “suff er the changes 
that were needed to make her just as receptive to the reality of the Irish-
men as she had been to her imagination of them” (22). 

Th e practice of resuscitating folk traditions is modifi ed and mocked 
in Th e File on H. as Albanians, eager to modernize, overlook the very 
Illyrian traditions that would interest those abroad. Th e push to dis-
cover national folk traditions and establish literary history and linguis-
tic heritage comes from without, in the fi gure of foreign scholars.  Yet 

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the contests over antiquity, initiated by foreigners interested in profes-
sional gain, overshadow the potential consequences of their research, 
including the recrudescence of ethnic strife. Th e scholars bank on the 
immunity of scholarship, yet fi nd themselves caught inside a bloodier 
contest.  A disturbing parallel appears in the story “Th e Blinding Or-
der,” from Agamemnon’s Daughter.  In that story an Austrian consul re-
marks, in a brutally callous identifi cation of the proverbial silver lining, 
that the Ottoman practice of blinding has led Albanians to rediscover 
their lahutas and give birth to a “ ‘fl owering of oral poetry’ ” (198). In 
both cases, culture hunters ignore human costs.

On the boat that takes them away from Albania, the scholars read a 
poem about themselves in an Albanian newspaper. Th e oral epics thus 
demonstrate variations that include accounts of their own arrival and 
strange behavior, much like the “Th e Song of Milman Parry,” alleg-
edly penned by a Croat bard. Th ese recitations indicate that the past 
is not static, that legends and rituals still have functional signifi cance. 
It is precisely by means of such misunderstandings that Kadare sub-
tly affi  rms the richness of the Albanian epic tradition, foregrounds its 
contested legacy and points out the widespread misunderstanding of 
its function, transmission and signifi cance.

In the press release for the award, John Carey, chair of the judging 
committee for the Man Booker International Prize, described Kadare 
as “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to 
Homer” (Man Booker Prize 2005). Yet the epic and classical tradi-
tions that Kadare channels in his novels are often fi ltered through what 
Casanova calls “centers of consecration.” Th e heart-broken journalist 
in the story “Agamemnon’s Daughter,” as the title suggests, likens his 
girlfriend’s sacrifi ce to Agamemnon’s murder of Iphigenia at the begin-
ning of the Trojan War.  Iphigenia’s death, which the narrator has just 
been reading about in Robert Graves, fi ts the narrator’s situation better 
than the Albanian folk legend that fi rst comes to his mind. Th e refer-
ence to Robert Graves is as much an exposition of the complicated and 
non-linear nature of Kadare’s relationship with classical literature as it 
is a commentary on censorship during the Hoxha years.

Set in the 1920s, Broken April (New Amsterdam Books 1990), de-

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tails a bourgeois Tirhana couple’s honeymoon to the mountains of 
the northern plateau (labeled “the accursed mountains”) to holiday 
amongst highlanders who still observe the Kanun, the thousand year 
old set of laws once dominant in the entire region. Th e couple’s cul-
tural tourism in the “other Albania,” the project of the unsuspecting 
journalist husband, turns sinister when the young wife locks eyes with 
Gjorj, a young highlander bearing the black ribbon that identifi es the 
target in a blood feud. Th e honeymoon quickly evolves into a fren-
zied—yet unspoken—search for the ill-fated young man. Th e mutual 
fascination of bride and highlander ends in her madness and his death, 
leaving April “broken.”  

Broken April presents an Albania with its own center and mysteri-
ous and misunderstood periphery; the tensions between modernity 
and tradition are tensions within the country itself. Critics of Kadare 
who accuse non-Albanian Kadare fans of cultural tourism overlook 
Kadare’s own commentary on the phenomenon. High in the hills of 
the northern plateau, the debt manager of the blood feuds keeps a 
library of books and articles about the kanun by outsiders. Th e File on 
H. and Broken April remind us that the people we stare at also look 
back, some with reverence and desire, some with knowledge and some 
with revulsion. Kadare himself has spent little time in the northern 
plateau—a couple of weeks as a student in the 1950s and a couple 
more as a journalist in the 1960s. His geographical and cultural sources 
are themselves partially literary, partially imagined. Kadare’s Albania—
“Kadaria” for enthusiasts—is colder than the actual Adriatic country 
and often shrouded in a geographically incorrect fog.

Th e tension between center and periphery resurfaces again in Spring 
Flowers, Spring Frost (2000). Set in the post-Communist era, the narra-
tor watches a group of youngsters cruelly unearth a hibernating snake. 
Later the narrator watches the similarly unearthed Kanun devour his 
girlfriend’s family and end their relationship as some families in the 
small town begin to settle age-old blood debts from the pre-Commu-
nist era.  Alongside new curiosities like bank heists and shaved arm-
pits, long-dead attachments fi ll the post-communist void. On one 
side beckons tradition, on the other, the ambiguous call of Europe. 

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Young Albanian men disappear at the vengeful hands of long-forgotten 
enemies just as they declare themselves dead to facilitate emigration. 
Ghosts generate ghosts.

Th roughout Th e World Republic of Letters, Casanova both criticizes 
and affi  rms literary norms, occasionally using the term “anachronism” 
to designate writing that diff ers from the reigning style at the center 
of consecration. In Th e World Republic of Letters she belittles realism as 
a nationalistic practice, a quaint but conservative and retrograde tech-
nique to which “deprived writers” are particularly, but not exclusively, 
prone. She labels realist techniques “commonplace” and “ordinary,” 
but tempers her criticism with an optimistic outlook: “Th e relative 
backwardness and poverty of such regions are not permanent condi-
tions,” she concedes; “not all writers on the periphery are inevitably 
‘condemned’ to backwardness, any more than writers from the center 
are necessarily modern” (101).  

Casanova attributes revolutionary potential to Th e World Republic of 
Letters, which she off ers as a corrective to the inequities of literary recog-
nition, a “critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated 
writers on the periphery of the literary world” (354–355).  She identi-
fi es stylistic and thematic similarities between writers from diff erent 
countries and diff erent historical periods, arguing that the strategies 
of peripheral writers are both limited and shared. Th ese impressively 
wide-ranging comparisons, so essential to her argument, are seductive 
but thin; due to the encyclopedic scope of her work, authorial state-
ments and plot summaries are often substituted for close readings. 

Despite her anti-elitist claims, Casanova frames success in terms of 
offi  cial acknowledgment, fi nancial gain and sales. She cedes judgment 
of universal worth to prize-giving institutions, in particular the Nobel 
Prize Committee, whose yearly literature award she affi  rms as an un-
disputed confi rmation of literary merit: “Today writers everywhere are 
agreed in recognizing it as the highest honor of the world of letters. Yet 
there is no better measure of the unifi cation of the international literary 
fi eld than the eff ectively universal respect commanded by this prize” 
(147). Casanova devotes less analysis to the function and meaning of 
prizes or the culture of awards that, English notes, make the obituaries 

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of notable writers resemble the sports page. English has done much 
to dispel the misperception that these large-scale awards are greeted 
without cynicism, even by the recipients themselves; “Historically, it 
is diffi  cult to fi nd anyone of any stature in the world of arts and let-
ters who speaks with unalloyed respect for prizes” (187). It is precisely 
this “scandalous currency” that keeps the culture of prizes afl oat; even 
if people don’t think recipients are worthy of prizes, they believe they 
should be (196).

Casanova often complicates her compulsory nods to anti-national-
ism. For instance, she suggests (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?) that both 
Faulkner and Hemingway should be included on the list of French 
Nobel laureates because of the early respect for their work in France.  
What would she make of English’s claim in Th e Economy of Prestige that 
prizes act in the interest of prizes, not of artists? English explores the 
famous case of Tolstoy, who lost the Nobel Prize to the French poet 
René F.A. Sully-Prudhomme. He details how the Stockholm commit-
tee attempted to save face by making sure that they never awarded him 
one and argues that this apparent perversity served only to enhance 
the prize’s prestige, by confi rming the Nobel committee’s status as a 
frustrating, yet autonomous and mysterious entity, “possessed of spe-
cial power, special capacity to make distinctions where others cannot” 
(147).

Both English and Casanova discuss the case of the Nigerian Nobel 
Laureate Wole Soyinka. Th e choice of the experimentalist, English-lan-
guage writer Wole Soyinka for the 1986 Nobel Prize helps Casanova’s 
theory about the boons of consecration from the center. Yet, English 
points out, the prize diminished his domestic legitimacy, particularly 
among other Nigerian writers: “To embrace the award, to view it as a 
great honor, was, in this view, a way of rejecting indigenous and ver-
nacular culture in favor of global European hegemony” (299). Casa-
nova contrasts Soyinka with fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, 
whom she dubs a “national writer” and situates at a distance from liter-
ary mean time, in association with which the “great heroes of litera-
ture invariably emerge” (109). Because Achebe’s work revisits national 
traditions, Casanova takes him, like many other national writers, to 

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task for a variety of breaches of literary conduct, including “essentializ-
ing diff erences, reproducing outmoded models, and nationalizing and 
commercializing literary life” (109).  

A moment in literary history that could problematize Casanova’s di-
chotomy between nationalist and universal writers is Conrad’s favora-
ble reception in interwar France—reception granted, to a large extent, 
due to the work of André Gide. Th e Nouvelle Revue française coterie 
who translated and reviewed Conrad’s work often saw him as a French 
writer lurking beneath the English language.  Insolvent and canny 
about cash, Conrad certainly benefi ted from the prestige and distinc-
tion that accompanied his formal introduction in France. But to what 
extent did he take aesthetic direction from Paris? Conrad was aggrieved 
that his earlier sea-oriented works won favor and not the later intrigues 
which he deemed superior.  He loathed the designation of maritime 
writer as much as Kadare appears to loathe being called an “historical 
writer.” Casanova does blame translators for the ethnocentrism that 
so often characterizes writing published in the center. But did Conrad 
write in English, rather than Polish (his mother tongue) or French (his 
second language) because of international pressure?  Or, are we to take 
him at his own word and believe, as he claimed, that the genius of 
the English language made him write, that if he hadn’t heard English 
(which he fi rst heard as an adult), he would not have written a word? 
Casanova typically accepts writers’ own assessment of their work and 
choices, but would she accept Conrad’s claim of disinterested aesthetic 
inspiration and artistic autonomy? 

Just months before awarding the inaugural Man Booker Interna-
tional Prize, the committee announced a related prize of £15,000 
for the English-language translator of the award winner’s choice. Th e 
prize indicates a watershed moment in the history of literary awards 
by recognizing the signifi cance of traditionally invisible translators. 
Th e award was created after the judges became aware, during the pre-
liminary stages of their work, of the crucial role of translation. At the 
award’s ceremony, John Carey called for British publishers to support 
translation, opining that translators do more than politicians to ease 
the world’s tensions.  

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Kadare chose Princeton professor David Bellos, who has translat-
ed seven of Kadare’s novels from the French thus far. Kadare knows 
no English and Bellos just the rudiments of Albanian, yet both are 
optimistic about the enterprise of translation. Kadare has repeatedly 
expressed a preference for these double translations that bypass the 
frequently expurgated and mutilated Albanian originals in favor of the 
French editions revised and approved by Kadare himself. It seems quite 
plausible that Kadare is also thankful for Bellos’ recognition that he 
is not, in Bellos’ own words, “in any ordinary sense, a contemporary 
writer,” or, as English puts it, “repackaged” (292). Bellos also honors 
the complex intertexuality of Kadare’s prose, bringing out its rich allu-
sions to Dante, Kafka and Shakespeare, among others.

Prizes are driven by politics and awarded for heroic personal behavior, 
sometimes even for marginality.  Th e current Günter Grass controversy 
demonstrates the extent to which literary prizes are widely perceived 
as awards for comportment. Writers from the Balkans are particularly 
subject to scrutiny; writers from that region are expected to be more 
than writers. At times, consecration is not, in the fi nal count, quite the 
kind of literary recognition a writer hopes for.  Just as some of Kadare’s 
novels hint that Albania and Albanians fascinate the outside world pre-
cisely because of their tragic past, the multifaceted nature of approba-
tion is acknowledged even in his initial public response to winning the 
prize.  In the response, quoted on the Man Booker website, Kadare 
expresses hope that that the prize will open the doors for other kinds of 
literary capital and “other kinds of achievement” (“Albanian Novelist 
Wins”). He voices a call for understanding: “My fi rm hope is that the 
European and world opinion may henceforth realize that this region, 
to which my country, Albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds 
of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the fi eld of 
the arts, literature and civilization.” 

Th e awarding of the Man Booker International Prize has entailed 
some criticism of Kadare’s perceived complicity with the Hoxha re-
gime. David Bellos has pointed out that Kadare was the only writer on 
the award’s shortlist to be singled out for criticism from his own coun-
trymen on the International Man Booker website. Yet Kadare’s writ-

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ings incorporate this eventuality as well and, in many ways, turn the 
spotlight back on his readers. Th e dream interpreters in Kadare’s novel 
Th e Palace of Dreams (1998) recognize the self-refl ectivity of interpreta-
tion. Set in nineteenth-century Constantinople, Mark-Alem Quprili, a 
young man of Albanian heritage, is selected to join a group who sorts 
and shifts through the dreams of dreamers from the far reaches of the 
Ottoman Empire, in order to detect conspiracy and dissent. Th e titular 
palace of dreams, the Tabir Sarrail, is an odd blend of an imaginary Ot-
toman institution and the Communist Central Committee building 
of Tirhana. It bears suspicious resemblance to the workings of a liter-
ary prize committee; one group registers the countless dreams, another 
group sifts out the important ones, yet another reads the important 
ones closely and a select few judges them.  Selection is a mysterious and 
dangerous process; those who control the dreams also possess “the keys 
of the State” (124). A sinister process is at work that will make inter-
pretation into an act of repression and violence for which the selected 
dreamer receives imprisonment and death, not £60,000.  

Kadare’s acceptance speech at the award’s ceremony in Scotland af-
fi rms his citizenship in “another realm, the realm of literature.” Like 
the architect in Th e Successor  , he acknowledges the grim challenges 
of writing under a “ghastly regime,” but he fi rmly situates himself as 
an inheritor of the “great writers,” detailing his early fascination with 
Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Kafka, all of whom “became his true 
masters.”  Towards the end of his speech he recalls the circuitous route 
his writing took to be read aloud by the jury.

. . . one day, passing through the night of dictatorship, our prison 
bread ended up by accident on your table.  In your free cities—Paris, 
London, New York, Madrid, Vienna, Rome. . .—you picked up the 
prison loaf and inspected it with curiosity.  You took a bit and found 
it good, and reckoned it was just as edible by you who live in the free 
world.

Mixed in with this deep gratitude is an implicit injunction to his 
foreign readers not to condescend. Kadare came to read and write in 
a diffi  cult and circuitous manner, but it seems unlikely that he would 
accept Casanova’s thesis that each writer is situated “not spatially but 

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temporally,” or her suggestion that we read according to this schema 
and concentrate on “inequality” (351). Kadare draws attention to the 
horrifi c circumstances under which he wrote in “the back end of a tiny 
country crushed under the heel of Communism.” But the “miracle of 
Biblical proportions” that he notes is that the “prison loaf” does not 
taste like prison loaf. Let’s take him at his word.

English and Casanova both note how “consecrating” nations assimi-
late foreign works to their own aesthetic preferences, political agendas 
and literary categories.  Economic realities inform the literary tempo-
rality Casanova outlines, as well as the system of prestige explored by 
English.  Literary awards clearly honor more than merit.  Yet Kadare 
does not “yield,” as Casanova suggests dominated writers must; his 
writing off ers very specifi c insights into questions about the forms that 
“modernity” takes and their perceived status as a goal (156). 

Kadare’s win was not heard loudly in the United States, despite the 
colorful prize stickers that now adorn his books.  Th e award will secure 
him neither fi scal gains nor media frenzy.  But translations of his work 
will continue, and those of us bound to English are lucky for that.  His 
consecration is our gain. And James English’s observation that prizes 
breed prizes has been confi rmed: Th e Man Booker Group has just in-
troduced a yearly Man Asian Literary Prize.

References

Nafi si, Azar
2005 Spoilt for Choice.  Th e Guardian, 4 June, Guardian Saturday Pages.

Man Booker International Prize
2005 Albanian novelist wins inaugural Man Booker International Prize 2005 

(Press release). http://www.manbookerinternational.com/media/release

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