Nobel rot
From David Bellos Sir: Stephen Schwartz’s attack on Ismail Kadare (‘Literary courtesan’, 16 July) cannot be allowed to stand. Schwartz has published similar pieces before: in the Albanian Catholic Bulletin in 1993 and 1994 and in the Weekly Standard in 1997. In all instances Schwartz’s purpose was to stop Kadare being awarded the Nobel Prize. The arguments used to label Kadare a servant of the Albanian Party of Labour were dismissed by Noël Malcolm, in the New York Review of Books, as absurd. Which they remain.
Kadare’s power to survive the evil Hoxha regime derived from his literary eminence alone. The first print-run of 20,000 copies of The Concert was sold out within hours of its appearance at the beginning of September 1988. This kind of popular support is what really gave Kadare his protection. It is simply grotesque to blame him for not having been butchered. We should rather praise him, as the Man Booker International panel decided to do, for producing literature of a very high order under the most inauspicious circumstances.
Schwartz’s description of Chronicle in Stone as ‘a homage to the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastër ... and a flattering offering to the dictator’ is profoundly wrong. This narrative of a wartime childhood depicts Hoxha’s hometown as a den of strange vices and violent civil strife between supporters of the Balli kombëtar and the (communist) partisans. An analysis of its deeper themes of subversion by Arshi Pipa caused Kadare great anguish, since these ‘revelations’ could have had him sent to prison or even the firing squad. The murder of a Ballist, to which Schwartz refers, is only one among several instances of terror, perpetrated by Left and Right, depicted in the novel.
I doubt very much whether any journal would have published scandalous libels such as Schwartz’s had their object been known to be a Western citizen within reach of a good lawyer. The publication of Schwartz’s unfounded attack on Kadare is a clear and repulsive instance of the colonial mentality.
David Bellos
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
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