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Publication Date: 4 Dec 2008 | Series: Vintage Classics
At the heart of the Sultan's vast but fragile empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams: the most secret and powerful Ministry ever invented. Its task is to scour every town, village and hamlet to collect the citizens' dreams, then to sift, sort and classify them, and ultimately to interpret them, in order to identify the "master-dreams" that will provide the clues to the Empire's destinies and those of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus tapped into and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind.
Kadare's Palace of Dreams stands as the symbol of the thought-police who have, through history, been the most effective instruments of oppression at the service of dictators.
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"Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper" Jean-Christophe Castelli, Vanity Fair
"If there is a book worth banning in a dictatorship, this is it" Julian Evans, Guardian
"Kadare's delicately misted view of another world (as much internal as totalitarian) lives up to the splendour of his title" Julian Duplain, Independent on Sunday
Inexorably takes your breath away (Herald )
Book Description
A novel which arose from the author's ambition to invent a hell of his own, Kadare's macabre vision of tyranny and oppression was banned immediately when it first appeared in Albania in 1981.
Translated by Barbara Bray from the French version of the Albanianby Jusuf Vrioni
Ismail Kadare's "The Palace of Dreams" is a book that reads like Kafka as influenced by the painter M.C. Escher with a bit of "1001 Arabian Nights" thrown in for good measure.
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian poet and writer. He is also the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and was selected from a list of nominees that included Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Milan Kundera, and Gunter Grass. The Palace of Dreams is one of his best known, many say best, work.
"Palace of Dreams" is set some time in the 19th-century in an Islamic-ruled Ottoman Empire that includes the Balkans (including Kadare's native Albania). The Palace of the title is a mammoth office building where the dreams of everyone in the kingdom are submitted for analysis. It is a Byzantine bureaucracy whose complexity is matched only by the dark, complex hallways and byways of the building itself. The Sultanate considers the dreams of his subjects to contain clues to the future. Like an oracle of Delphi, dreams are interpreted to predict plots against the Sultan or threat to the Empire generally. The interpretation of dreams is a powerful tool used to run the Empire and control its citizens and as a result the Palace of Dreams is the most feared agency in existence.
Into the Palace of Dreams steps a young new employee, Mark-Alem. Mark-Alem is a member of the Quprili family. The Quprilis are a powerful family of Albanian origin. For generations the family has produced high-ranking Viziers, the approximate equivalent of Cabinet Ministers, to the Sultan. Although a powerful family the Quprili's relationship over the years with various Sultans has been rocky and has been marked by purges and bitter in-fighting.
... The tenuous relationship between the Quprilis and the Sultan forms the backdrop of the story.
After Mark-Alem makes his way through a maze of corridors he is taken on as an apprentice. He quickly moves from a clerical position, sorting dreams, to interpreting them. Kadare's writing is very powerful as he traces Mark-Alem's path as an employee on the fast-track. One can feel the job beginning to overwhelm Mark-Alem's thoughts and actions. What seemed as unreal to Mark-Alem as an apprentice now seems commonplace. In a certain sense Kadare portrays vividly one person's descent into a claustrophobic, mystical hell where dreams are more real than reality.
At the same time renewed tensions between the Sultan and the Quprilis emerge. One specific dream involving a bridge in Albania built by the Quprilis hundreds of years ago quickly becomes the centerpiece of the plot. This same bridge played a critical role in an earlier Kadare novel, "The Three-Arched Bridge". Mark-Alem finds himself faced with analyzing this dream and the consequences of that interpretation drives the last third of the novel.
Palace of Dreams has been doubly-translated, first from Albanian to French and then from French to English. Despite that it felt as if I were reading the book in its original language. Entering Palace of Dreams was like entering a dream itself, one that quickly turns into a nightmare. As I read the description of Mark-Alem wandering, lost, through the hallways of a dimly lit Palace of Dreams I could feel the increasing despair welling up in Mark-Alem. The credit for that must be attributed to Kadare but with a significant nod to the translators who kept the writing both fresh and as disturbing as it appears to have been intended.
Kadare's The Palace of Dreams is well worth reading.
The book follows Mark-Alem, a member of the Quprilis, a very important family in an Empire under a totalitarian regime, who starts working in the Tabir Sarrail. Known as the Palace of Dreams, the Tabir Sarrail is a kind of government department that catalogues and interprets all the dreams that the people report as the dreams sometimes include prophecies. As Mark-Alem rises in the Palace's hierarchy, he learns about its purpose, the most important one being the choice and interpretation of the Master-Dream, one which has consequences to the state or its rulers and for that is presented directly to the state's Sovereign, the Sultan. The story is always told from Mark-Alem's point of view, and the reader learns everything as he does, understanding the event as they unravel around him. In the beginning, the author seems to concentrate in making the reader understand Mark-Alem, his thoughts, his habits, his insecurities, his family and his work. But after a while, the plot thickens as it focuses on the relationships between the Quprili family and the Tabir Sarrail, as Mark-Alem himself starts to understand what happens inside the Palace of Dreams, building up to the moment where he understands how far the rulers will go acting solely on what has been interpreted in a dream. Kadare still keeps a surprise to the very end of the book, which you may predict if you were paying attention to the details all the way from the very beginning.... It was very interesting to read a story that although being obviously about a totalitarian regime that even oversees people's future acts, is different from the usual for keeping within one character's point of view and focusing on his specific story, having no reference to heroes that fight it, to apocalyptic situations or even to the fall of the sovereign's regime as could be expected. Kadare manages to convey how one feels living under the control, being part of the very "machine" that keeps said control and still playing your part as if there was no other chance or there was no conscience of consequence. A notion that reminds me of surviving rather than living, that shows how the true, absolute control can be achieved. The text itself is easy to read and the story develops at just the right speed, being neither too slow nor overwhelmingly rushed to the end. The Palace of Dreams wasn't one of my favourite books and I'm not about to read all that Ismail Kadare wrote but I did like it and I'd recommend it to people that enjoy stories based on dystopian dictatorships as Orwell's 1984 but don't mind a bit of fantasy as brought here by the prophetic dreams.Read more ›
Kadare succeeds in this novel by weaving together the fabrics of nightmarish surrealism and the reflections of a trapped subject to portray the fear and paranoia generated by a communistic ideal, his own world.
This is classic Kadare, creating both apprehension and anticipation. A haunting allegory which leaves you questioning the boundaries where real meets surreal.
This novel first appeared in Communist Albania and was promptly banned by the authorities. Set in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, the Palace of Dream is a vast building in Constantinople to which the local authorities send the dreams of the people of their province. They initially go to a department where they are selected for their possible significance; those selected in this way are then forwarded to a more senior department for interpretation; the most important of these which are thought to have a bearing of the safety of the state become Master Dreams and are sent on to the Sultan. Each step in fraught with problems: which of them seem significant enough to be sent for interpretation? How are they to be interpreted? All the people working in the Palace of Dreams from top to bottom are terrified of making a mistake.
The central character, Mark-Alem, joins the Palace of Dreams. On his mother's side he is related to the famous Albanian Quprili (Köprülü) family which has produced several powerful Viziers and other high state servants. Their history is studded with dramatic promotions and equally dramatic depositions and worse when the Sultan become suspicious of their eminence. Mark-Alem is initially persuaded by his family to enrol in the Palace of Dreams, where his promotion through the layers of the bureaucracy is astonishingly fast, without Mark-Alem planning to advance in this way: in no way is he a schemer; rather he is an innocent who does not understand his promotions which do not in any way relieve him from his permanent anxiety.
The atmosphere in the Palace is positively Kafkaesque - innumerable long corridors in which it is easy to get lost; a horde of clerks working silently, worriedly and for long hours over mountains of files.... They are not supposed to discuss their work, but they do in a scrappy kind of way during the breaks, but what they say deepens the sense of uncertainty. The first four-fifths of the 203 pages build up this oppressive and threatening atmosphere without anything dramatic happening. Then suddenly there is a shattering explosion of arrests and executions of members of the Quprili family and their retinue: one of the Master Dreams on which Mark-Alem has himself been working has been interpreted by the Sultan to implicate them in a plot against the state. Will Mark-Alem be one of the victims?
Clearly the novel is a take on the frightening atmosphere in Hoxha's Albania: the bureaucracy, the fear, the paranoia of the rulers, the unpredictability of who will be brutally toppled for something of which the victims do not know - all that mirrors the experience of the people of Albania; but the ruthlessness which permeates such societies from top to bottom is here confined only to the very top of the pyramid, the Sultan himself. Mark-Alem and his fellow toilers in the Palace of Dreams seem entirely passive.
The book, originally written in Albanian and later translated into French, is now translated from the French into English by Barbara Bray, who beautifully captures its sinister and haunting atmosphere.Read more ›
