Book 172: The General of the Dead Army, by Ismail Kadare

I'm kind of flabbergasted. How did I neglect this blog for over half a year?

Yes, yes, I've been busy: I've published a new collection of poetry and started on a PhD programme. But the truth is, I finished this novel in July, and just got distracted from blogging about it—partly because it was due at the library and I had to return it, and out of sight, out of mind... 

And it's a pretty interesting book: the author's first novel, written in 1963, not from the viewpoint of Albanians but from their former oppressors: our protagonist's an unnamed Italian general returning to the country to recover the bodies of his World War II soldiers who were slain there.

It's a pathetic, Sisyphean task, dealing with unlabelled coffins and stadiums built on top of graveyards and angry locals and memories of weeping mothers and sexy lady-friends and his own grumbling wife—but while he's from a nation defeated in the war, he has reason to disdain the Albanians too, this hickish uncivilised collectivist farmers on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He travels with a priest, whose remarks on faith just underscore how hollow the ritual of recovery is. He even meets a German general on the same mission, and they bond, two losers stuck in the middle of nowhere.

And there are the voices of the dead here too: stories of shame and betrayal and dumb heroism, last thoughts in italics intruding on the narrative and loose diary pages from a defector hiding out in a farm, at the mercy of both sides of the war. We might be in Southern Europe, but there's a deep sense of Eastern European fatalism suffusing this text.

It makes me think of the books I've been reading for my PhD: postcolonial works of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean diasporas, Amitav Ghosh and Michael Ondaatje and Olive Senior and Derek Walcott and Caryl Phillips. They're writing about history, how the long shadow of colonialism refuses to go away even after the promised liberation of independence. And that's happening here, too. The scars of the war alive two decades later. The dead soldiers still haunting the land.

Of course, now it's seventy years later, and Fascists and Nazis are no longer ghosts, but walking and legislating among us. Sympathy for the losers of history is all well and good, but dead ideologies have a habit of becoming undead. Which spells some mighty trouble for those of us who just wanna stay alive.

(From My Maps)

Representative quote: 

I have a whole army of dead men under my command now, he thought. Only instead of uniforms they are all wearing nylon bags. Blue bags with two white stripes and a black edging, made to order by the firm of "Olympia". And those bags will now be inserted into their coffins, tiny coffins of precisely determined dimensions, of a size stipulated in the contract signed with the local governments' association. At first there had been just a few sections of coffins, then, gradually, companies and battalions were formed, and now we are on our way to completing regiments and divisions. An entire army clothed in nylon.

"And what shall I do with it, my army?" he said between his teeth.

Next book: The Legend of Kalesh Andja, by Stale Popov, from Macedonia.