The Accident [Hardcover]

Thanks to a long history of censorship Balkan writers have a reputation for approaching and describing their subject matter indirectly, using dreams, symbolism, allegories, and historical events rather than tackling any theme head on. IK is no exception. What appears to be a fairly straightforward novel in Parts 1 and 2, is undone in Part 3 and ends in obfuscation, with symbolics and an ending that will convince or satisfy no one.
Besfort and Rovena, both Albanians, have known each other for 14 years and have been engaged in a LAT-relationship for nine. B, a former freedom fighter, works for the Council of Europe in a human rights/international criminal law capacity and is constantly on the move between European centres of power like Luxemburg, Vienna, Brussels and Strasbourg, but not The Hague.
Rovena is a pale, beautiful local NGO-staffer in Albania, who secures a scholarship to Graz, Austria, a more convenient venue from which to honour B's occasional invitations for a rendezvous, which are always consumed in hotels. She is a confused person, permanently insecure about B, herself, her own feelings and acts, challenging B for being a tyrant, apologising the next day and wondering why she said it.
The pair dies in the first pages of the book. Part 1 is a summary of the Austrian officials' efforts to discover the cause of the fatal car accident and possible motives for foul play. One nameless investigator continues the quest for truth for years on end. He put together Part 2 describing the couple's last 39/40 weeks on the basis of airline tickets, hotel bills, letters, content of agendas, interviews. Part 2 describes not what happened exactly, but how, on the basis of the data uncovered, what R and B's sudden death could have caused.
Unless this reviewer is terribly mistaken, Part 3, supposedly written with great reluctance by the same mysterious person who produced Part 2, and dealing with the couple's final seven days, is a return to Balkan literary tradition. "The accident" contains many genres: police procedural, spy novel, investigation into the concept of love (a stated objective), a Barbara Cartland-like pursuit of R's always-changing tastes and priorities. No genre is dominant. For this reviewer the high point in the novel is B's recounting to R a story from Cervantes' "Don Quichote" about multiple betrayal, and a description by the nameless recorder of the thoughts and acts of the pair visiting Club Lorelei, a blasé adventure in search of voluntary, experimental betrayal.
Professional reviewers and academic scholars of literature have a handful. They should perhaps focus on love and betrayal. Is it a mongrel of a book or is it a masterpiece, true literature whose richness will take decades to be fully understood? Whatever, it is a highly (re-)readable bowl of soup with plenty of clues and other ingredients.

This book started out promisingly, and the first part describing the accident that kills a couple and the official enquiry got me wanting to keep reading. The testimony of the taxi-driver set up a mystery to be resolved. However in Parts 2 and 3 the dreamlike (or should it be nightmarish) quality the narrative takes on had me utterly bewildered. The second part is a recreation of the last 40 days of the two main characters, and is detailing their complex affair from the viewpoint of both parties. The final part is an attempt to explain what happened to them on the fateful day. I have three possbile theories as to why I hated this book. 1) I'm far more stupid than I thought and it has just gone completely over my head 2) the author's aim was to disorientate and create the same sense of confusion in the reader about the relationship as Rovena appears to have or 3) it's rubbish. As it has won awards and other people rave, and I'm hoping I'm not very dense I think I'll go for option 2) and say that it was sucessful in achieving that aim but didn't create an enjoyable book for me.

(3.5 stars) Shortly after a taxi leaves the Miramax Hotel in Vienna for the airport, it somersaults into a gully, and kills the man and woman passengers, both Albanian. Three witnesses give information to the Austrian police. The dead man, Besfort Y., was an analyst for the Council of Europe on western Balkan affairs, and he had been a "thorn in the side of Yugoslavia" before its divisions-there is suspicion that he might have been responsible for the bombing of the country. Despite this, the accident is initially thought to be a routine traffic accident. It is not till several months later that the European Road Safety Institute regards this as an "unusual" accident. Three months after that, the State of Serbia and Montenegro, which had had both victims under surveillance, begins to look into the accident, and their interest, in turn, sparks the interest of the Albanian Secret Service, an eventuality which makes the narrator wonder if this is a political murder after the fall of communism, or an example of residual "communist paranoia."

At this point at the beginning of this new novel by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, the story appears to be fairly straightforward--a police procedural or the beginning of an espionage thriller, but despite the author's almost bare-bones style, the novel quickly becomes full of confusing information and evidence. Nothing is as simple as it seems here. About the characters, we know only what they actually tell us about themselves and their relationship, not what the reader may be accustomed to concluding after seeing the characters in action and interaction.

Rovena's letters show her to be sometimes cheerful, and sometimes despondent, and she has shared her concerns with her former lesbian lover and with a friend from Switzerland, indicating that she often fears for her life. At other times, however, their problems appear to be political--Besfort has had a "quarrel with Israel," but Rovena notes that "After Serbia was defeated, you did not seem to know what to do with yourself, and you turned on me again." One person believes that, for some reason, Besfort is afraid of the International Court in The Hague. Sorting out and evaluating these conflicting political suggestions, in the absence of clear evidence one way or the other becomes a major challenge, especially considering the amount of evidence suggesting other reasons for their possible deaths.

To further complicate matters, the author also refers several times to the occult and "traces of the unnatural" as the novel develops. There are references to entering "the other zone" when the two lovers travel to Albania; Rovena's body travels inside an ancient bas-relief there; and a long section in which Rovena reads Don Quixote and sees parallels between her infidelity and Anselmo's test of Camilla's constancy all add to the mystery and confuse and complicate the direction of the novel. Time itself swirls, confounding the chronology, which provides no dates, and erotic encounters add further to the complexity. Ultimately, the author's intentions for the novel itself become as elusive as the truth about the accident. The "straightforward" investigation of an accident ranges so widely into other areas and so confounds fact and fiction, history and other-worldly events, that even after re-reading substantial portions of this short novel, I feel no closer to knowing who these characters are and what happened to them than I was when I began it. If Kadare is trying to create a "political allegory," by drawing parallels between the action here and the history of Albania, as he has done in other novels, the nature of his parallels remain obscure, at least to me. Mary Whipple