Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #84597 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 286 pages

Synopsis
A new novel from the master storyteller and winner of the inaugural Man International Booker Prize 2005 Guaranteed massive review and media coverage. Set in Albania at an unnamed time, "The Successor" charts the repercussions of the death of the regime leader's designated successor; did he kill himself, or was he murdered? Speculation is slow to start, but once doubt is raised, rumours begin to gather. Confusion and mounting tension build and the aftermath is narrated through a series of interweaving voices: the architect of the Successor's home, the minister of the interior and the Successor's bereaved daughter - all influenced by the outwardly benevolent but increasingly sinister Guide, the country's leader. The novel charts the escalating tension, distrust and anxiety of a regime that is collapsing in upon itself. "The Successor" is simultaneously a historical novel - based on actual events, and reinforced by the author's private conversations with the son of Mehmet Shehu, upon whom the central character is based - and a dreamlike psychological thriller.

In a style reminiscent of Kafka, Gogol and Orwell, it asks questions of the human character's resolve when faced with the iniquities of tyranny: blending dream and reality, and confronting legendary past with contemporary history.

Customer Reviews

the swirling mists of rumour, lies and fears
You never quite know where you stand with this book - but that is precisely the point. The paralysingly confusing world of a closed communist society (Albania), where Party is all, but the Guide (dictator, clearly based on Enver Hoxha) leads all. He expects his whims and hints to be obeyed as divine oracles - except that people too often don't really know where they are leading. The fear is driven precisely because of the impossibility of interpreting situations. That is the genius of this book - it keeps the reader (as well as all the characters) guessing to the end, like all the best books - but does arrive at some sort of resolution by the end (albeit a very unpalatable one). A word of praise, or a visit to an engagement party by the Guide could be all that is required to sign a death warrant. Black is white and history is a resource for the present regimes (just as Orwell observed in 1984). The casualties of the party machine are everywhere, a party which for all its claims of progress and purpose, is as directionless and meandering as the whims of the Guide.

This is sparsely written but i know of no other recent book that conveys the utter insanity and terror of living under a dictatorship. Ingenious

badly written or badly translated
"But in every variant of the mix, the ingredients themselves reamined irreducible and in the end came to resemble shards of glass, or a substance that was simultnaeously the stock and the fermenting agent without which no mystery could have risen." - though not typical of the book, i think this extract does show how badly written it can be, which raises the question what are people talking about when they say it is well written? the foremost criteria for well written prose is that it makes sense / isn't a jumbled mess / is easily understood - i defy anyone to say that the above extract meets this criteria. perhaps i'm beoing unfair. but i fell i should add that the second chapter of the second part is almost imnpossible to follow as the reader never knows who the narrator is talking about as the characters in that scen are not introduced and the writer struggles with tenses, not knowing his past perfective from his past simple - an error of translation? i don't know, but i want my money back. and who is that idiot Richard Eder in the scotsman - "One of the great writers of our age" writen on the froint cover... what a joke

The silences make this a deeply disturbing book
Earlier reviewers have offered excellent insights into the content and structure of this book and, especially, about its relation with what we know of the 'historical facts'. What I would like to add is that, for me, the book acquires its disturbing quality not so much from the (nearly) unresolved mystery of the the successor's death as from the silence that surrounds important aspects of the plot. While aclimate of terror surrounds many episodes of the plot and afflicts several of the core characters, the terror is portrayed with a light hand, suggested rather than described. The scene where the successor's successor is expelled from the party through a bureaucratic (rather than literal) lynching is absolutely memorable and worthy of Koestler. Yet, in a curious way, the successor himself remains a pale figure - we hear nothing of his own brutality and fanaticism. Yet, we hear a lot from his daughter, who seems to be immersed in her own unfulfilled dreams of love, quite oblivious to the miasma that afflicts the country. We hear nothing of the large numbers of 'ordinary' Albanians who lived lives of abject poverty and terro for four decades, while their rulers were living in the own fantasy worlds. While the terror in Orwell's 1984 is direct, in your face and total, the terror in this book has been normalized. And this makes it more horrendous.