The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, by Ismail Kadare, translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos
reviewed by Matthew L. McAlpin

Ismail Kadare. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost. Trans. from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos. Arcade, 2002. 182 pp. $23.95.

In Ismail Kadare’s latest novel, Albania awakes from the isolation and terror it experienced under communist dictatorship. But this awakening is bittersweet. With all of the benefits of joining the modern European order come unforeseen problems: taxes, bank robberies, and the rebirth of the kanun, an ancient system of blood-debt and revenge that perpetuates an endless cycle of violence. Within this Albania we follow Mark Gurabardhi, a painter and minor governmental functionary, as he ponders the mysteries in his own life: his missing friend Zeb, the murder of his boss, the visit of his girlfriend’s mysterious uncle and her subsequent disappearance, and the location of a secret archive of files used as blackmail during the communist era. Between the chapters that tell this story are a series of “counter-chapters” in which the writing breaks free from the restraints of naturalism and where Kadare shows his virtuosity as novelist and poet. The counter-chapters take diverse forms—folk tale, Greek myth, dream, and prose poem—but each is handled with masterful skill. Kadare’s retelling of the Tantalus myth has Bulgakov’s fantastic absurdity; it portrays the Ministry of Death as a vast bureaucracy with its endless forms and hierarchies. Zeus is a totalitarian dictator, employing spies and interrogating Tantalus behind closed doors in the “Great Prison,” burying his crime under state-sponsored propaganda. In another scene of interrogation, the iceberg that sank the Titanic confesses, offering as a defense a meditation upon the divide between those born of heat and those born of ice, a boundary never to be crossed. This bizarrely touching meditation encapsules the eerie tone of the novel; it is as odd as it is elegiac, yet resists descending into bathos.