Product Description

As Spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers, unknown under the tyrannical ancient regime, strike up the National Bank. The ghastly Kanun, regulator of medieval Albania's blood vendettas, is dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And the ultraexplosive secrets of the state secrets, rumoured to be buried in the area, are threatening to flood the entire nation. As the dreamy painter Mark Gurabardhi struggles to complete a portrait of the iceberg that struck the Titanic, he finds his quiet life disturbed by ancient love and modern barbarism, by the renaissance of Brezhnev and Oedipus, and by the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its new found freedom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #354228 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Girokaster near the Greek border. He is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He established an uneasy modus vivendi with the Communist authorities until their attempts to turn his reputation to their advantage drove him in October 1990 to seek asylum in France.

Customer Reviews

Addictive, simple and entrancing.
Any book that makes a 45-minute journey on a crowded Tube train vanish apparently into seconds is truly beguiling and entrancing.
The book is deceptively simple and easy to read yet has layers of surrealism and philosophising that will have you pondering for weeks afterwards and going back to read specific pages.
It works for anyone who has wondered if they're in the right relationship or job or for anyone considering the eternal questions of life.
Put simply, it is unlike anything else you'll ever read.

What is real?
After 40 years of Enver Hohxa's totalitarian rule the new democracy came in many fits and starts to Albania. Ismail Kadare explores the conflicts and contradictions left over from the old regime in a remote mountain town. People are still disappearing never to be heard from again. The secret police appears to remain in place and operating in the shadows. The blood feuds of the ancient rule book, the "Kanun", are rumoured to being revived. And the stories that the ominous secret state archives are hidden in vaults in the local area won't die. In this tense and confusing time, Mark Gurabardhi, a portrait artist, strives to live a "normal" life. With Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Kadare has created an intriguing and engrossing story of realities and imaginations during a complicated period in his homeland. Kadare, who resides in France, was the inaugural recipient of the Booker International Prize and has only since then become better known in the English speaking world.

In "Spring Flowers, Spring Frost", history and legends mix with the banal day-to-day events of the protagonist's life. Greek mythological characters, such as Tantalus and Oedipus, mix with historical figures such as Brezhnev. The iceberg that was rammed by the Titanic takes on consciousness and presents its perspective of the tragedy. In his nightmares, Mark is imagining himself in an alternative role of a secret police officer. Or does he actually lead a double life and these are not dreams? Mark's model and girlfriend has secrets of her own that make her aloof and possibly dangerous to Mark. Can he help at all? Meanwhile his friend Zef is still missing... Kadare succeeds in creating an atmosphere of insecurity and suspense. Facts and imaginings increasingly intermingle, thus creating new realities.

Kadare's Albanian work was doubly translated: into French and from that into English. The excellent work by David Bellos makes the reader forget the language distance between the original and this version. Bellos captures the style and tone exquisitely and conveys the rich and poetic language that Kadare has employed. Bellos' account of his discussion with Kadare and reflection on indirect translations are an interesting complement which, unfortunately is not reproduced in the book itself. [Friederike Knabe]

Picture of an uneasy society
I have been a devotee of Kadare’s previous books (and this one, like those, has been beautifully translated, this time by David Bellos); but I am afraid I found this one less satisfying. Unlike his other books, the treatment here can only be described as surrealistic. He moves between a number of themes - the story of Tantalus, the story of Oedipus, the sinking of the Titanic, an Albanian fable by which a young girl is married to a snake - whose relationship to the main story can perhaps be worked out by readers more sensitive than I am. And one never knows quite where one is, whether in a dream world or a real world, whether the central character is an artist or a deputy chief or police or both. The book also ends inconclusively: one’s expectation that the fate of the characters will be resolved is not fulfilled.

I take the main theme of the book to be the disappointment with what happened in Albania when the Communist dictatorship collapsed. The vacuum this left was in part filled by a revival of the Kanun, the ancient code, which the communists had suppressed, of unending bloody vendettas between families. Kadare has written about the Kanun before, in Broken April, where one of his characters showed a romantic fascination for its “noble savagery” (see my review of that book). Now there is no longer any half-acknowledged admiration: only despair that such barbarity wells up again from the remote past, even while the shadows of the communist past still hover over the society and the Council of Europe is an ineffectual occasional presence. The tyranny of communism has been ended; but this is a melancholic and often poetic image of a society that is uneasily adrift.