Agamemnon's Daughter

This, a wonderful mix of fiction, mythology and politics in the form of what is more meditation than narrative, is frightening, beautiful, and utterly compelling.

It's writing of perhaps the most profound kind, writing that tries to think very seriously about politics, about human nature, about madness of the collective and individual kind, and about how all those things can intersect with devastating consequences. It's writing that we should be grateful we have, and grateful that it has been translated so that we can experience the privilege of reading it.

Of the three long short stories contained in this volume, the title story is the most powerful and the most chilling. It follows a young man through one day, during which he attends a state parade and muses on the collapse of his relationship with Suzana, the daughter of a Party official. He begins to see parallels with the legend of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to the gods, in return for victory at Troy.

As he eventually construes it, Suzana's father's request that she end her relationship with the young man 'looked pretty insignificant, but it was much more than it seemed... Suzana was the harbinger of an irreversible impoverishment of ordinary life'.
At the heart of Agamemnon's Daughter is the gradual revelation that this pitiless regime will stop at the nothing to dominate its subjects entirely: 'If the supreme leader Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, that meant there would be no pity for anyone else either'. And Albania, of course, isn't just a former Communist country with a repressive regime - it has the distinction of being one of the most repressive , with a leader who resisted every intimation of progress and liberalisation, breaking first with the USSR, and then with China, denouncing their 'revisionism' and 'impure' forms of Socialism.

This frightening lunacy is brilliantly evoked in the placards on display at the parade, including the immortal 'We will eat grass if we have to, but we will never renounce the principles of Marxism-Leninism!' It isn't hyperbole.

Insight into the reality of a regime such as this, where the horror is greater than you might imagine, is immensely difficult to achieve. In fact, because it cannot be imagined with any ease, perhaps it cannot be understood at all without the help of myth or folklore. Everything Kadare uses is revelatory in this respect, with nothing superfluous or irrelevant.

The narrator's mythical meanderings lead to a horrifying truth, and the gruesome folk tale remembered by the narrator - that of Bald Man, who cut away all his flesh to feed the eagle returning him back to the world from hell - is a forceful parallel, shocking but hardly exaggerated. By the time he returns to the tale of Iphigenia, and sees the truth that it holds ('Nothing now stands in the way of the final shrivelling of our lives), the young man understands that the eagle's appetite can never be sated.