The Successor

by Ismail Kadare

Book Overview

The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14.Did he kill himself or was he murdered? This question slices through Ismail Kadare's masterful psychological thriller. As... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1841957631
• ISBN13: 9781921145063
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Text Publishing Company
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

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Enormous relevance in a global world of shock and awe

This is a book that although fascinating as a mystery, fascinating as a book on Albanian by one of the worlds newest and greatest writers (most of his books have been recently translated also from the French) but the deepest value of the book written by a man who is a brilliant novelist and poet has to do with a global world where all that is solid melts away and truth is defined by dominance and brutality and thus dividing a nation and also confusing individuals and as now after the cold war so much of the world is placed under these conditions..whether in the Balkans, the Middle East or in parts of North and South America this book takes on massive significance....a must read.

The Void of Succession: a troubling thriller from a chink in the Wall

Kadare may be the most intriguing and maddening writer to emerge from the other side of the Wall - or, more accurately, from one of the wall's more peculiar chinks. He can write clumsily, as he proved in Three Elegies for Kosovo, and The Successor lacks the lyric grace of the literary heavyweights Kadare upset in winning the International Man Booker Prize (unless the problem is with the two rounds of translation from Albanian to French to English), but Kadare concisely captures the mood of glasnost - a short hand term for the disappearnce of central authority, replaced by deep ideological uncertainty. The chestnut of a murder mystery is really a parlor game played by the aging, increasingly paranoid Enver Hoxha (renamed Number 1 in The Successor), while the human tragedies caused by Communism's labyrinthine party politics (the successor's daughter is unable to marry, the architect of the successor's house is guilt-ridden over the secret passageway he constructed between the houses of #1 and the successor) only presage the book's disquieting ending. In the Successor's fragmentary recollections through a medium we glimpse a reversion to a primitive future that may be just as bad as totalitarianism, likewise dominated by the basic human - and inhumane - drive to power.

Pervaded by the miasma of fear

This novel is based on actual events: the Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha ("the Guide" in this book) denounced his long-standing premier and presumed heir, Mehmet Shehu ("the Successor"), who then was said to have shot himself. Whether he was murdered or committed suicide is the question at the centre of this book, and Kadare offers an ingenious answer in the last chapter. The whole book is suffused with the fear and paranoia prevailing in a country ruled by suspicious and devious tyrant: the terror felt by those near to him and by their families; the sycophantic rivalry for his favour; the dread felt by people like doctors or architects asked to work for someone in the government in case their work is dangerously caught up in some unpredictable political manoeuvre; the cautious and nervous gossip of the population; the attempt of foreign governments to make sense of what was happening in that hermetically sealed country. Kadare has been fortunate in his translators. Most of his books have been translated from the Albanian into French and then from the French into English - in this case by David Bellos. This is the eighth novel of Kadare's that I have read and between them there have been at least seven translators - but they all capture Kadare's unmistakeable clean and simple style.

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon. "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." That was how Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union. If Churchill found the USSR mysterious he would have been totally perplexed by life in Albania during the isolated, despotic regime of Enver Hoxha. Ismail Kadare's "The Successor" captures that inscrutable mystery in a masterful fashion. Ismail Kadare is an Albanian poet and writer. He is also the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and was selected from a list of nominees that included Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Milan Kundera, and Gunter Grass. His latest work published in English, The Successor, is a remarkable book that provides the reader with evidence that Kadare's award was well-deserved. The "Successor" of the title is Mehmet Shehu. Shehu was, until shortly before his death, Enver Hoxha's right-hand man. Shehu was a commander of a Communist-led partisan brigade during the Second World War and had a reputation for brutality that led to his promotion to a division commander of the National Liberation Army. After the communist takeover of Albania Shehu led a purge of those party members suspected of being aligned with Yugoslavia's Tito after Tito's break with Stalin and the USSR. Hoxha, referred to as "the Guide" throughout the book, took Shehu under his wing and Shehu was known throughout Albania as "Number 2". As is often the case being "Number 2" was a precarious perch to sit on in regimes where aging tyrants (Stalin and Hoxha both come to mind) often struck out at those closest to them as their own mortality seemed to weaken them. Shehu was no exception. On December 17, 1981 after an apparent split with Hoxha over Albania's continued isolation from the world, Shehu was found dead in the bedroom of his newly renovated house. A gunshot wound to the head was the cause of death, one quick ruled a suicide. Shehu's death and the speculation as to the cause of his death form the heart of Kadare's "The Successor". The book plays out like a parlor room mystery by Agatha Christie but one influenced by Franz Kafka's The Trial and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Neither the reader (nor anyone in Albania for that matter) knows whether the Successor committed suicide or was murdered. All the doors to the house were locked, but there was a secret passageway installed during the house's renovation. There are a number of possible suspects including the Guide, the Guide's "Number 3" man and successor to the successor, the Successor's wife and daughter and the daughter's former fiancé. Kadare takes us into the tortured mind of all the suspects. They each in their own way have some feeling of culpability for the Successor's untimely death, no mater the cause. As we read the thoughts of each player in this parlor room drama Kadare paints a vivid portrait of life in Albania during the Hoxha regime. The inexplicable, never to be determin