Wypadek

by Ismail Kadare, Dorota Horodyska (Translator)

Nowa powieść wybitnego albańskiego powieściopisarza, laureata Międzynarodowej Nagrody Bookera w roku 2005, zaczyna się od dziwnego wypadku taksówki na autostradzie pod Wiedniem. Daje on początek nie mniej tajemniczemu śledztwu, w którym co rusz pojawiają się nowe tropy i domysły. Co łączyło dwie śmiertelne ofiary wypadku, albańskich emigrantów: specjalistę ds. bałkańskich w Radzie Europy i pracownicę Instytutu Archeologii? Ich związek osobisty (romans?) wydaje się nie mniej burzliwy i niejasny, jak historia ich politycznego zaangażowania w konflikt na Bałkanach i jego konsekwencje. Czy na pewno zginęli w wypadku? Może był to zamach? A może podwójne samobójstwo?

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Albanian Literature, Literature, Novels, European Literature, Literary Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Ismail Kadare (also spelled Kadaré) was an Albanian novelist and poet. He has been a leading literary figure in Albania since the 1960s. He focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts, and in 2015 the Jerusalem Prize. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. His works have been published in about 30 languages.

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, in the south of Albania. His education included studies at the University of Tirana and then the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, a training school for writers and critics.

In 1960 Kadare returned to Albania after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union, and he became a journalist and published his first poems.

His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, sprang from a short story, and its success established his name in Albania and enabled Kadare to become a full-time writer.

Kadare's novels draw on Balkan history and legends. They are obliquely ironic as a result of trying to withstand political scrutiny. Among his best known books are Chronicle in Stone (1977), Broken April (1978), and The Concert (1988), considered the best novel of the year 1991 by the French literary magazine Lire.

In 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of democratisation. During the ordeal, he stated that "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 2 out of 5]

Balkan Irony?

Nothing happens in the Balkans which isn’t significant to someone. Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Militant Atheists and their respective nationalities rub up against each other with considerable cultural friction. Small things become big things at the drop of an archduke or a rotating presidency. The region itself is largely the result of historical accident. So even the most random traffic accident could have dramatic implications. Or at least that is the theory of the Albanian and Serbian national intelligence agencies which vie with one another to be the first to discover what these implications might be.

This is life in the Balkans. An epistemological culture of suspicion and nationalistic one-up-manship. To be caught napping while some rival unearths domestic scandal is a profound disgrace. Especially in the case of two Eurocrats who conducted a pan-European affair for twelve years in every capital city and every first class hotel on the continent, and end up dead when their taxi crashes over a barrier. The potential embarrassment would be incalculable if they had been up to something political. What if The Hague Tribunal were to become involved? Who would be safe then? No, dedicated investigation at any cost in such a situation is demanded.

This is not an un-encouraging set-up for a thriller of international intrigue or a parody of cultural rivalry. Unfortunately it deteriorates rapidly into what appears to be a melodramatic allegory. Rovena, the Albanian woman who desperately wants to be wanted by the European diplomat, Besfort, who plays her relentlessly for years. She tries other lovers, even Swiss women, but she can’t rid herself of the idea of being one with him. Besfort has a recurring dream about being an aide to Stalin. He seems only to value Rovena for listening to him about his dreams (well, that and the sex, which has a peculiar Romany puissance apparently). Is this about real people or countries?

The account of years of tediously repetitive break-ups and descriptions of increasingly bizarre sex, do not constitute a coherent narrative. Perhaps the point is to suggest the lack of progress in achieving Albanian integration with either its Balkan neighbours or the European Community. Or perhaps it is just a pointless sexual melodrama. The centrality of the idea of the last forty weeks of the couple’s lives is a mystery, perhaps known only to Albanian folklorists, as with so much more of this opaque and boring book. So perhaps there are indeed events that occur in the Balkans that have no real import after all - for anyone.

I’m also open to the view that Kadare’s novel is one big send-up, an obscure form of Balkan irony. Other suggestions are also welcome.

[Fionnuala]

I expected, perhaps unreasonably, to understand the Balkans a little better after reading this book by Albanian author, Ismail Kadaré, but instead I was desperately in need of a tutorial not only on Balkan history and politics but also on understanding Kadaré's very opaque writng. Though my copy was in English, and seemed well translated, it was still very difficult to follow his oblique approach to the events he was writing about. There seemed to be layers and layers of meaning beneath the main characters' every utterance, and by the end, I was as frustrated as the unnamed investigator who was seeking to piece their story together. Everything seemed to revolve around the loaded meaning of such terms as tyrant, slave, queen, subject, dominator, liberator. I know that writers from regimes governed by dictators have an understandable tendancy to write in code, Herta Muller is one who springs to mind, but perhaps their codes are easier to figure out if the reader shares a similar history.

An aspect of this novel that I enjoyed very much was the very original structure. The first part described the known facts of the main event, police accounts, witness statements, bits and pieces of documentary evidence like hotel bills and flight receipts, conversations recalled by friends and contacts. The second part was an imagined reconstruction of the last forty weeks in the lives of the main characters by a researcher who has become intrigued by the event. The last part involves the same researcher carrying out some further investigations as a result of new insights he has gained from his imagined recounting of their last forty weeks. And yes, like everything else in this book, forty weeks has certain significance in Balkan mythology but don't ask me what it is...

[Enrique · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un poco lenta, pero abre muchas cuestiones y reflexiones al lector. Tiene 3 capítulos haciendo una versión de "El curioso impertinente" (mini novela incluida en El Quijote), relacionada con el argumento de la novela que narra "El accidente" prodigiosa, de muy muy alto nivel literario.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book confusing and, at times, difficult to follow. But, maybe the author intended this.


The story is set long after the end of Communist rule in Albania.


It concerns the extremely thorough investigation of an automobile accident that occurred 17 Km outside of Vienna. The car, a taxi containing two passengers and its driver, is thrown off the road. No other vehicles are involved. The driver survives. So far, this much is a certainty in this novel by Albania's leading novelist Ismail Kadaré. The rest is far from certain.

For much of the book, it appears as if the two passengers, who are found dead by the roadside, are Besfort Y and his lady friend Rovena St. As Besfort Y is of importance to the Albanians, an Albanian investigator doggedly tries to reconstruct the events leading up to the accident.

With a series of unreliable witnesses, including the taxi driver, he descends into a black hole of confusion and confounding. This does not make for easy reading, but I suspect it gives the reader a good insight into the tortuous thought processes that were needed to survive the oppressive regime that was inspired by Albania's long serving dictator Enver Hoxha. In doing this, the novel is extremely successful, but it certainly addled my brain, especially late at night when I read most of it!


This is a book and should appeal to those who enjoy philosophy.

[Nick Wellings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straightforward prose to describe (amongst other things) obsession, obsession for other, for posession of other, obsession for a puzzle to be solved, knowledge, secrets etc. Subtle symbolic approaches, and as one blurb review says, elements of fabulism, and pushes at the boundaries a little (and thus to great effect) of the compact between author and reader.

Kundera-like in its man v. woman analyses of relationships. Contained the best two sentences I have read all year so far, exquisite metaphor the more powerful for being understated and unshowy. Overall: Bizarre. establishes its own coiled, insistent and persistent obsessive fictional autarky to create a compelling tale indeed.

In five words:

Not your usual carcrash lit.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am puzzled. I am searching for the core of the political connotation layer of this book. Much later than today I hope to finds words for the significance of this novel. I, for the time being, suppose it’s somewhere in the contrasts of western ideology versus communism, dominance versus submission. Somehow Kadare is playing us, readers. That might ‘accidently’ the foundation layer of this novel.
By the way, Ismail Kadare should have been rewarded the Nobel prize already.
Don’t hold your breath, but I will get back to this location on the internet to elaborate. JM

edit 1 July 2024:
On the occasion that Ismail Kadare has dies today I think it’s appropriate to pay this kind of respect to an author I admire.
Central to the novel is Besfort's story about how followers of Hoxha were treated. Like in many cases of Kadare’s novel, all in all it is an allegory on political systems. We can put this statement into more concreteness. Rovena never escapes the impression that she is stuck in the role of slave and that Besfort does what he wants in laconic freedom, although he is nervous about the expected summons for the tribunal in The Hague, even though he is there in the role of diplomat, envoy on behalf of the Council of Europe. And he gets frightening dreams that remind him of the Stalinist period, as if he has to answer for the totalitarian regime, even though he has distanced himself from it. Together with with the political connotation, never far away in Kadare’s writings, thát’s the tension this novel has been built upon. JM

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can't explain the inexplicable

I am a big fan of Ismail Kadare. I've read (and reviewed) a lot of his novels and have steadily said that he deserves a Nobel Prize. It seems to me that the failure to give him one is political in nature. But, you know, everyone has their off days and I think he wrote this novel on some of those days. It has a lot of the same characteristics as such books as "Doruntine", "The Palace of Dreams", "General of the Dead Army", "Elegy for Kosovo" and "The Fall of the Stone City", to name a few. But all of the above were better. Kadare likes to play with dual visions of everything, to obscure any possibility of knowing "the truth"---which is pretty realistic if you get down to it. What happened may not actually have happened. What a person says may not be what they actually thought or did. But this book sacrifices any semblance of a story for a spirally-constructed set of feelings of two people who may or may not have been in love. Their sexual connections are prominent. A nameless police inspector is trying to sort out how Besfort and Rovena came to die in an automobile accident that occurs on the first page. The more he delves into the case, the more everything becomes blurry and obscure. Finally, were the two people actually the two people who were said to be killed? We go back and forth between the inspector's investigations and the feelings of the couple before their fatal day. At the end, nothing is clear. "We could all ask questions of each other. What right have we got in this pitch-black night to ask about things that are beyond our powers to see?" (p.250) I appreciate that take on human existence, but when I read, I like there to be more of story. It may be I am too thick to understand some Balkan allegories implicit in the novel, perhaps, as in many of his other novels, Kadare is hinting at the Albanian political situation.. But he sure did a good job of hiding it, if he did. No,if you haven't read any Kadare, don't start here, but definitely start.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't really get this at all. Not sure if something was lost in translation, but I still have no idea what happened.

[Vonia · Rating 2 out of 5]

To Kadare's credit, I was transported to another place while reading this novel. His prose is very descriptive, but almost in an avant-garde way. Impressive if excessive use of metaphors, infusion of important themes, especially the man versus woman/power of the sexes. Secrecy, subtlety, razzle-dazzle blurring between fact & fiction.

However, I might have been preoccupied with trying to determine exactly what was really occurring at any given moment more than I would have liked. The timeline shifts rapidly without word, first person narrative in one paragraph becomes third person in the next, two scenes are detailed, after which it is insinuated that one was a dream. Sometimes it is clear that a scene is a dream, but we are told otherwise. Is this magical realism or not? The author does not seem to be able to decide. It is marketed as a psychological thriller. I would say it is more a mystery. I will say that I did read until the end because I was enthralled to know what exactly happened that fateful morning. And in the end, myself shocked most of all, it wrapped together alright, although more than a few questions had been left unanswered. I had given up on understanding the details, even important ones, of this novel sometime in the first few chapters.

We are given a story, divided into three parts. The first document the preliminary investigation following the mysterious deaths of two passengers outside of Vienna, supposedly on the way to the airport. Key players in the mystery are often less than willing in the investigation, which turns into something possibly involving political scandal. The second part is clearly stated to be a researcher's own fictional account of what happened between the two victims, Besfort Y. & Rovena St. The third part is the conclusion, where this fictional account, along with the facts, are wrapped together for a supposedly factual ending. Or is it?

There are several subtle/not so subtle themes interwoven throughout the story, LGBT, prostitution, genocide, political ideals, religious beliefs, corruption, trafficking, etc. Very strange psychological ideas are introduced. Some characters seem pretty obviously psychopathic, etc. The entire novel is a puzzle, in every sense of the word.

I suppose this was written after long Communist Albanian rule (Albania essentially serves as a character throughout the text, main characters being from there, the author himself being Albanian), so maybe the author intended for this to reflect the complex course the characters took in hiding the detail of the case? The difficulty solving mysteries under such a regime? Yes, maybe Kadra intended this to be a confusing dream of an enigma upon pages marketed as a novel. Why text upon pages seen as a novel? Because it makes it more of an enigma.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy Kadare's books even though they mystify me. I like the challenge of reading something that's not straightforward, especially since the stories are set in a part of the world I don't know much about.

To see my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201... but be aware that there are lots of spoilers, it's not possible to unpack this book without them.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ismail Kadare's The Accident is a brief novel that explores, sometimes obliquely, the ways stories are told, how relationships develop and shift over time, and the life of Albanians following the collapse of Communism. The story centers on the accident of the title, which is detailed in the first of the novel's three sections. A man and a woman leave a hotel and get into a taxi for the airport. Something happens – something distracts the driver – and he goes off the road. The man and woman are seen in the air, sometimes clinging to one another, sometimes seperate. Both die. The driver survives, but is unable to describe what he saw that caused the accident, other than to say, time and again, that just before the accident the man and woman tried to kiss.

There doesn't appear to have been any foul play, but because the accident is a strange one it is marked as an “unclassified” type, which gives to it a longevity as Serbian and then Albanian spy agencies come across the file, and later as a researcher opens the file and tries to understand the nature of the relationship between the man and woman. The attention given to the accident is remarkable; as Lisa Hill writes in her fantastic and detailed review of the novel, the novel shows the “excess of agents and analysts with not enough to do after Tito had gone and Yugoslavia had been dismembered.” See how the accident is forgotten, briefly, before being brought back to life by these young Balkan governments:

Three months later, the archivist could not hide his astonishment when the governments of two Balkan countries, one after another, asked to inspect the file on the accident at kilometre marker 17. How could the states of this quarrelsome peninsula, after committing every possible abomination known to this world – murdering, bombing, setting entire populations at each other's throats and then deporting them – find the time, now that the madness was over, instead of making reparations, to enter into such minor matters as unusual car accidents?

Kadare's prose here is marked by its opaqueness. When one researcher – the one who provides us much of the lovers' story, as he can imagine it from reading their letters, speaking to friends, piecing together their movements over the years – details their affair, the language of it is often combative, not so dissimilar from the language of war. Much as the novel centers on and spins off of the central event of their accident, the lives of the lovers Besfort Y. and Rovena St. spin around the collapse of Hoxha's Communist government, that shared history explaining, for some, their off-and-on relationship. For Rovena St., the end of the dictatorship is imagined as a sort of dividing line, not just between past and present but between the impossible and the possible.

The rattling of the chains dragging the dictator's statue through the centre of Tirana kept interrupting her thoughts. It was this sound, louder than any earthquake, that divided past from present. Everything that had once been impossible had suddenly become real, such as his invitation over dinner, a week after they had met, to a three-day conference in a Central European city.

As the researcher reconstructs their relationship, Besfort Y. and Rovena St. reference their relationship in regards to Albanian folklore and Cervantes. Mystifying references in their letters to meeting “post-mortem”, and descriptions of their meetings that suggest they have shifted from romance to the relationship of that between a call girl and her client, become easier to understand when viewed through the lens of attempts at reconstruction. Sensing their relationship is coming to an end, the lovers attempt to find some new way of understanding their relationship, a new way of being. This is, as Lisa wrote in her review, not so different from the attempts of new Balkan nations to build themselves after achieving a first or reformulated independence. There are depths to which every relationship is unknown and remains unknowable, or appears differently to each person, as Kadare suggests via the very structure of the novel, in which certain sections are acknowledged to be entirely imagined. And yet, there is also the suggestion that all these things can be tethered to another, older story, that there is a reference point for each and every story, as with Besfort Y's request for three days' leave from work, just before his death.

He could not forget what a colleague had said a long time ago, when he first mentioned the inquiry to him. In such cases of law, the English refer to remote history, Muslims to the Qur'an and emergent African states to the Encylopedia Britannica, but in the Balkans they find every precedent with little effort in their ballads. Three days' leave to carry out a duty, normally something left undone? There will certainly be a well-known paradigm for this.

At end, The Accident is an elliptical and often frustrating novel. These frustrations, though, are coupled with moments of intense beauty. Though Kadare offers no clear guide to his goals with the novel – though there is no real path to understanding the relationship of Besort Y. and Rovena St., or the interest of the spy agencies with their accident, or the interest of the researcher in the couple's story – he does offer a story that is as gorgeous as it is baffling, as it shifts through time and space and myth in seeking an answer to this couple's story. That there doesn't seem to be an answer, that their lives are as enigmatic at the end of the research as they were in the moments following their deaths, doesn't weaken the novel, but rather serves as encouragement and inspiration to explore it for a second time.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rovena and Besfort are killed in a strange car accident and a lone researcher attempts to understand their true relationship, recreate the events leading up to their deaths and discover what really happened in the accident.

The story is complex, often confusing and vague as it pulls off the layers of Rovena and Besfort's relationship, one that is dysfunctional and toxic at best. I was annoyed by this in the beginning, but the more I read the more I realized that this was probably the intent of the author...and brilliant.

[Pierre Menard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primo incontro con il più noto scrittore albanese, da anni citato come uno dei potenziali vincitore del Nobel per la letteratura. Devo dire che sono un po’ perplesso, perché il libro mi è piaciuto in generale e ho apprezzato l’idea di mescolare politica, giallo ed erotismo e la scelta dei temi del romanzo (del 2010), ma ho trovato la parte centrale piuttosto debole e confusa e ho sviluppato una piccola insofferenza per lo stile volutamente nebuloso di Kadaré. Perciò il giudizio delle tre stelle mi sembra il più adeguato. Leggerò certamente altri suoi romanzi, per farmi un’idea più adeguata della sua narrativa.

Vienna, primi anni del nuovo millennio. Il giorno 17 ottobre, al km 17 di una strada che porta all'aeroporto un taxi finisce fuori strada: i due passeggeri, un uomo maturo e una giovane donna molto bella, entrambi di origine albanese, muoiono sul colpo. L'autista, gravemente ferito, ma vivo, racconta che nell'attimo in cui l'auto stava abbandonando la carreggiata ha visto nello specchietto i due cercare, forse senza riuscirci, di baciarsi. Il morto è Bessfort Y., diplomatico, studioso di questioni internazionali e membro del Consiglio d'Europa (*), coinvolto in modo non chiaro nei processi per i crimini di guerra nell'ex Yugoslavia in corso all'Aia. La sua compagna si chiamava Rovena, tirocinante presso la facoltà di archeologia della capitale austriaca. Con ogni probabilità i due erano amanti. Poiché si sospetta che l'incidente possa coprire un omicidio (o un duplice suicidio, o un omicidio-suicidio) le autorità albanesi e quelle serbe aprono due inchieste per appurare la verità, ma immediatamente si perdono in una foschia di vaghi indizi, coincidenze e dicerie, complicate dalle dichiarazioni confuse di una violinista, in arte Lulù Blumb, che fa capire di essere stata l'amante di Rovena. Dopo diverso tempo, la maggior parte degli inquirenti getta la spugna. Solo uno di loro decide, sulla base del controverso e incoerente materiale raccolto, di raccontare la storia dei due.

Ha termine così la prima, breve, parte del romanzo. La seconda, circa due terzi del libro, è il racconto forse realistico, forse apocrifo, del tormentato rapporto tra Bessfort e Rovena, condotto a ritroso. Il libro si chiude con un epilogo, anche questo opinabile, in cui si fa strada l'ipotesi del “simulacro” (à la Dick, per intendersi), confondendo ancora di più le acque e lasciando annegare il lettore nel dubbio.

L'incertezza è in effetti il leitmotif del romanzo: nella storia e nelle vite dei due protagonisti non sembra esserci niente di solido, niente di stabile, nessuna certezza. Non è certo il sentimento d'amore che li lega, per nessuno dei due (Rovena si interroga continuamente sulla natura del suo rapporto con Bessfort, identificandolo inutilmente con tutte le declinazioni possibili, dall'amore spirituale al rapporto padrone-schiava). Non si comprende quale ruolo abbia Bessfort nello scacchiere politico europeo. Non si comprende quale sia il ruolo di Lulù Blumb tra Bessfort e Rovena, se sia il terzo vertice di un triangolo, o se sia una semplice confidente della seconda. Se l'idea di costruire una relazione sull'indeterminatezza è affascinante, la sua realizzazione mostra segni di debolezza: la parte centrale è troppo lunga e Kadaré esagera con l'evanescenza. Capitoli e paragrafi iniziano senza che si capisca dove ci troviamo – se in un luogo reale o nella mente di qualcuno -, o quali personaggi sono sulla scena (qui ricorda un po' Michael Ondaatje). La cronologia si frammenta e gli eventi si intrecciano violando il normale ordine temporale. A volte il flusso di coscienza lascia il passo alla narrazione degli eventi senza soluzione di continuità. La narrazione si appesantisce e il lettore finisce per smarrirsi e ritornare più volte sui suoi passi per capire che cosa l'autore gli sta raccontando e quali personaggi sta facendo parlare. A tratti si ha l'impressione che Kadaré faccia girare a vuoto la storia, per riempire altre pagine di dubbi e interrogativi privi di risposta. Per contro l'analisi della relazione tra i due protagonisti è condotta con raffinatezza ed estrema attenzione ai particolari: Kadarè sembra sapere perfettamente quanto possa essere complicato l'amore tra due individui così diversi e come la vera intimità sia difficile da raggiungere, quando qualcosa tende ad allontanarci continuamente dalla persona amata (ricordate il bacio che i due “tentavano” di darsi nel taxi?). L'erotismo che trapela dalle pagine dedicate alla fragile e sensuale Rovena è davvero ammaliante. Se la parte centrale funziona meno, il prologo e l'epilogo sono molto meglio costruiti e hanno il pregio di affascinare il lettore che non cerchi risposte semplici e una narrazione ordinaria.

Inframmezzati alla storia di Bessfort e Rovena ci sono numerosi riferimenti alla storia albanese ed europa, dalla dittatura di Hoxha, al difficile passaggio alla democrazia, fino alla guerra del Kosovo (1996-99). Alcune suggestioni provenienti da Shakespeare e Cervantes testimoniano l'aria di tragedia che si respira in Europa a seguito dei conflitti balcanici posteriori alla fine del Secolo breve. In una scena compare, senza essere nominato esplicitamente, lo scrittore Peter Handke, sostenitore del regime di Milošević. Verso la fine si ha la netta impressione che l'evoluzione autoritaria della relazione tra Bessfort e Rovena sia lo specchio del rapporto tra un dittatore (Hoxha) e il suo popolo (quello albanese), un rapporto malato e degenerativo che non può condurre altro che alla morte o, comunque, alla dissoluzione dei contraenti. Che L'incidente sia un romanzo politico celato sotto un dramma psicologico di taglio sentimentale-erotico? O magari è il contrario?

Complimenti alla Longanesi per la scelta della copertina, su cui campeggia una donna riversa su un letto di cui si possono ammirare le spalle nude, un braccio e i lunghi capelli castani, molto azzeccata nell’ottica del romanzo. Ormai è sempre più difficile trovare una copertina che abbia direttamente a che fare con la trama.

(*) Si tratta di un'organizzazione internazionale fondata nel 1949 che conta 47 stati membri (fra cui l'Albania), con lo scopo di promuovere la democrazia e i diritti umani nel continente europeo.

Consigliato agli scettici socratici.

Sconsigliato a chi tiene accese le lampade anche a giorno fatto.

[Pablo Csm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y eso que no es el estilo de novela que más me gusta, impresionante.

[Ana-Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Accidentul de Ismail kadare (2008)

“ Întinse așadar mâna spre flaconul de somnifere, luă o pastilă și o înghiți … Până la urmă tot avea să adoarmă. O frământa un soi de curiozitate, ar fi vrut să simtă ea însăși ce simțea el în momentul când aluneca în brațele somnului. Ca și când clipele acelea aveau să îi dezvăluie multe dintre cele mai ascunse secrete ale lui.Și poate nici de asta nu ar fi avut nevoie. În situația de față, unei femei ca ea i-ar fi fost de ajuns să știe un singur lucru. Să știe, de exemplu, dacă el, Besfort, avusese nopți în care luase somniferul din pricina ei…”

Această carte pare a fi despre un accident mortal în care piere un cuplu- Besfort și Rovena. Diverși investigatori urmăresc diverse piste, pentru a afla dacă există cumva elemente ale unui asasinat politic, căci el este un fel de comisar european, iar ea este o arhitectă care călătorește mult. În realitate, Kadare reconstituie fragmentele unei iubiri complicate, mai degrabă o iubire clandestină, cu întâlniri în hoteluri din tot felul de orașe europene, o iubire inegală, ce mi-a adus aminte de Tereza si Thomas din Insuportabila ușurătate a ființei de Kundera. Rovena pare a fi cea care îl caută și îl dorește cu aceeași ardoare pe imposibilul de prins Besfort așa cumTereza și-l dorea pe Thomas. Cartea aceasta nu ne duce la un răspuns clar și nu are un curs linear, are ceva de vis confuz, de viață deformată de emoții, de dorințe atât de intime încât nu vor putea fi niciodată reconstituite din gesturi exterioare, pare că suntem permanent pe pragul dintre cuplu și singurătate, dintre iubire și moarte, dintre dorință și crimă. Cei doi mor chiar din primele pagini ale cărții, iar personajele lui Kadare vor încerca să refacă ultimele lor 40 de săptămâni de viață. Ca cititor, te întrebi pe parcurs: dacă ar ști că mai au atât de puțin de trăit, cum ar fi mers relația celor doi? Vezi chinul, ezitările, micile răzbunări, căutările fiecăruia proiectate pe fundalul unei clepsidre. Noi cum ne trăim povestea sau poveștile de iubire?

[Mihai Savu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has a boring beginning, a car accident near Vienna where a couple died while the taxi driver remained alive. The local police and then the Serbian and Albanian police investigated the case that proved to be nothing more than that.

After a while, the case is reopened by a private researcher who gathers all evidences (tickets, hotel reservations, private notes, diaries, phone calls) and starts recreating the last 40 weeks of life of the dead couple.

First half of the book goes like this and I found it boring to read, because I detected the missing details intentionally left aside. Then Kadare makes a brilliant turn and opens more ways in front of the reader: the loving couple is not so loving anymore, Rovena feels being enslaved by the power of Besfort, he tries to make her free and pushes her towards another man, then comes another one just to prove her freedom.

Like a tyrant who wants the unfaithful ones to still love him and become addicted to him, Besfort sets her free to make her unfaithful. He does not have enough power to leave her, so he treats her like a call girl, then suggests a break-up and abandons her.

The story is composed like a puzzle, adding up more and more pieces that fill the empty wall - the life of Rovena and Besfort. In the same time, Besfort is involved in the political decision to bomb Yugoslavia and the accident might have been in fact a murder. No one knows exactly what happened, despite the researcher's hard work. Except maybe the reader, who can follow his/her own leads to find out.

[Kadircan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epey kasvetli bir ortamda akan bu romanı okumak çok kolay olmadı benim için. Okumayı zor kılan etkenlerden biri olayların geçtiği atmosfer ise, diğeri de olaylar arasındaki bağlantıların ve geçişlerin oldukça narin yapılmış olmasıydı. Dikkatinizi bir an kaybettiğinizde öykünün nereye geldiğini anlayamamanız gayet olası, ki ben böylesi bir durumla karşılaştığım için yaklaşık 100 sayfayı tekrar okumak zorunda kalmıştım.

Ancak kitabın okurdan talep ettiği ilgiye fazlasıyla layık olduğunu düşünüyorum. Bir araba kazası sonucu bir taksideki iki yolcunun ölmesiyle başlayan hikayenin ana meselesi, aşk, bağlılık-bağımlılık ve sadakat kavramları ile kadın-erkek ilişkilerinin sorgulanması gibi göründü bana. Yazarın bu sorgulamayı yaparken kullandığı arka plan ise, Arnavut toplumu özelinde Balkan toplumlarının Sovyetler sonrasındaki durumunu merak edenler açısından değerli bir referans olma özelliği taşıyor.

Öykü içinde Balkan mitolojisine dair bazı notlarla karşılaşmak mümkün. Kitabın beni en çok heyecanlandıran kısımlarından biri de yazar Kadare'nin Don Quijote'de geçen 'Meraklı Münasebetsizin Öyküsü'ne dair okumasını içeren bölümleri oldu.

Gerek biçim gerekse içerik açısından başarılı bulduğum bu kitabın ardından Balkan mitolojisi, yakın dönem Balkan tarihi ve Kadare yazını gibi alanlarla bir süre daha meşgul olacakmışım gibi geliyor bana.

[Nora Rawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

What's going on here, exactly? It's meant, seemingly, to be a psycho-sexual study, but it fails at that, never reaching the intensity of a Junichiro Tanizaki novel or even the over-the-top Story of O. It's also meant to be a commentary on the post-dictatorship Albania and post-Yugoslavia Balkans, and the parsing of dreams and diary entries does echo the paranoia of the Albania state and the constant creation of conspiracies, mainly imagined. Unfortunately there's no there there--nothing to be investigated, nothing convincing or interesting in the Besfort and Rovena relationship, which is constantly presented in terms it never remotely earns. And the digressions into what's different about beautiful women don't do the book any favors. At best, the book shows how disorienting re-entry into 'ordinary' life is for Albanias and Eastern Europeans after the collapse of local communist regimes and the resurgence if sectarian tensions, and how the past habits can't fade so easily. At worst, its unnecessarily obscure and pretentious pulp.

[Ben Thurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ambiguous and elliptical novel made up of complex and contradictory narrative threads. Ostensibly the account of an investigation into the sudden and mysterious deaths of two Albanian lovers, Rovena St. and Bresfort Y, pieced together by an anonymous state investigator, it is an exploration of obsession, sex, love, power and control.

In the context of a fragmenting, war-torn Balkans it is — even through its consistent focus on just two people and their love affair — also a deeply political novel, asking questions of how identities can be remade, new relationships forged, and whether truth and reconciliation (even resurrection) are possible in personal and public life.

There are no easy answers or straightforward resolutions to the conundrums of The Accident, and Kadare keeps us wondering what purchase we have in a reality that might lie behind the fragments of story and event gathered together by his unnamed investigator.

[Gustavo Krieger · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a mess! One thing is a bad book by a lesser author - another, is a terrible book by a talented writer. You can sense the confusion in Kadare´s mind as you read the story. It reminded me of some lesser books by Doris Lessing, when you see the author knows he is lost in the plot but he tries to go on by any means. This book is almost one of those "so bad it´s good". If it were a little worse it could even have a cult following - but it´s just bad.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by The Guardian, The Independent

[Juanita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow he reminds me a little of Murakami set in Albania in the 1980's.
Like Herta Muller's images of Eastern Europe...the cement grey iron curtain.

[Bora 1234 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was different from the others but yet incredibly intriguing and beautiful.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not even sure what I just read. Well-written, but the characters were so damaged. Sometimes I wasn't sure if the situations portrayed were real to them or imagined. Interesting read though.

[Pablo Alonso mateos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe is a great book, but too slow for me, only liked the parts about the Albanian history.

[Aga · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book by an Albanian writer…. The Accident by Ismail Kadare. Enjoyed, enjoyed, enjoyed… enjoyed the strangeness, mystery, the unexplained and the untold…

The book starts with an accident of two lovers, Besfort Y – an analysts at the Council of Europe and Rovena – an intern at the Institute of Archaeology in Vienna. The accident is mysterious and even more mysterious investigation follows. It focuses on the forty weeks before the accident and tries to put together facts about Besfort and Rovena. Everything is opaque and the reader never has clarity of what sort of relationship they had…apart from being sexual partners. There is also a political background to the book; the Balkan conflict. Again, there is no clarity around the couple’s engagement in the conflict and its consequences. We never learn if Besfort and Rovena died as a result of an unfortunate accident or whether it was murder or a double suicide. The ending surprised me.

The book is just very intriguing and the narration is brilliant. The edition of the book which I read has a very good intro by Jean-Paul Champseix, who says that the Accident was one of Kadare’s first books where he explored sexuality, love and physicality. He kept clear of those topics during the very prudish dictatorship of Enver Hoxha.

[Lia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew this wasn’t going to be a pulp crime novel with a tidy ending, but I wasn’t expecting this.

I generally enjoy contemporary novels that work classical mythologies into them. This one feels strange, forced, and unpleasant. The Don Quixote part feels especially out of place. I suspect I’m not getting the point, the reference, the allusion, all the loose fragments don’t seem to hold together. (I suppose that’s one thing that’s fitting for the Orpheus/ Eurydice myth —all we have are fragments that are incomplete and incoherent, and won’t hold together.)

The depiction of the lovers also felt really misogynistic (which would fit later depiction of Orpheus, I guess.) It’s not the dialogue, it’s the depiction of the body parts, the psychology, the pathological desires, the anxieties about desires, the gratuitous insertion of a gypsy... they make me think the author himself perceives women to be horrifying, manipulative, alien, and mysterious. I don’t know why I don’t find that as disturbing from Hesiod or Ovid. Somehow I’m less able to reconcile with that coming from a contemporary author, even if I know he’s trying to reimagine classical mythical figures in the modern world.

[Aisling · Rating 2 out of 5]

A taxi crashes on a street in Vienna and when the only survivor, the driver, regains consciousness all he can tell police is that the man and woman, Albanian citizens, in the back seat were "trying to kiss" when he glanced in the rear view mirror just prior to the accident. Thus begins a story as convoluted and ultimately as unresolved as any I've read. The book moves in time, place and perspective in a kafkaesque manner. We are not sure who anyone is, nor are we certain where reality ends and supposition and assumption take over. I found The Accident a compelling but ultimately dissatisfying read.

[Irena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book held my breath because of, and not despite of, its more traditional subject matter. Even if you read it merely as a 'love story', glossing over the allegory, it still is as enthralling an excavation as any other Kadare novel. Some nuances, which to me anyway comprise the book - the corruption of NGOs, Tirana's dreary February, the muted Balkans sexual warfare- are difficult to convey in a translation though.

[Donald · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this started out so promising - a strange traffic accident occurs that kills two people in a taxi when the driver sees that in the rear view mirror, they "try to kiss". Whaaa??? Then the story backtracks over the years of the two victims long love affair. And at the end? Well, I don't think I understood the end at all. Was it all real, imaginary, or supernatural? I just don't know.