{"id":67675,"date":"2024-03-12T17:10:19","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T16:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/?p=67675"},"modified":"2024-03-12T17:10:19","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T16:10:19","slug":"kadares-a-dictator-calls-shortlisted-for-booker-prize-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/euronews.al\/en\/kadares-a-dictator-calls-shortlisted-for-booker-prize-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Kadare\u2019s A Dictator Calls shortlisted for Booker Prize 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ismail Kadare\u2019s A Dictator Calls<\/em> has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.<\/p>\n

The book, originally published in 2018 in Albania, offers a meditation on Soviet Russia, authoritarianism, power structures and the relationship between writers and tyranny.<\/p>\n

In June 1934, Joseph Stalin reportedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of Pasternak\u2019s fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam \u2013 a man who had expressed criticism of the Soviet regime. In a fascinating combination of dossier facts, dreams and memories Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Booker Prize, reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters, the KGB and contemporary writers, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare\u2019s experiences writing under dictatorship (that of Albanian leader Enver Hoxha), when he received an unexpected phone call of his own.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe core of this brilliant exploration of power is an analysis of 13 versions of a three-minute telephone conversation between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934. Each of these is an attempt to understand or justify Pasternak\u2019s troubling, ambiguous response from a slightly different point of view. The book begins with what seems like autobiographical memories of Kadare\u2019s time as a student in Moscow, setting the tone which hovers continually between fiction and non-fiction, between what is real and what is invented. Kadare explores the tension between authoritarian politicians and creative artists \u2013 it is a quest for some kind of definitive truth where none is to be found,\u201d said the International Booker Prize judges on the novel.<\/p>\n

Critic Rebecca Abrams wrote for the Financial Times, \u201cWhat gradually becomes clear is that Kadare is using the Stalin\/Pasternak conversation as an extended metaphor to explore the nature of power and the interplay between political power and artistic power.\u00a0A Dictator Calls<\/em> is a thought-provoking consideration of the relationship between writers and tyranny, with John Hodgson\u2019s translation gracefully rendering Kadare\u2019s imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laura Hackett wrote for Times that, \u201cThe book is not really a novel. It\u2019s more like a cross between memoir, dream diary and historical investigation, in which Kadare trawls through reported versions of what was said during the phone call, with meditations on truth, creativity and tyranny. \u2026 Seasoned [Kadare] fans will be enthralled by this very personal meditation on the circumstances in which, against the odds, he still managed to thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>A Dictator Calls<\/em> is slim, but its themes are not. There\u2019s a fine line between uncertainty and obscurity, but the riddles of this novel are still ringing in my mind,\u201d wrote Orlando Bird for Telegraph.<\/p>\n

While Cory Oldweiler said \u201cThere are moments of real brilliance in\u00a0Dictator<\/em>, but overall it lacks the sustained highs and dramatic pacing of Kadare\u2019s best later work. Part of this inconsistency is due to the fact that the novel seems unable to fully settle on what it is trying to be, slewing between intense introspection, literary theory, fictionalised autobiography, and historical sleuthing.\u00a0It is, however, a fitting (possible) coda to a remarkable career, and considering its subject matter, it just might win Kadare the Nobel Prize for Literature, the one major award that he has never received,\u201d in his review for Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/p>\n

According to the official Booker Prize website, the 13 books chosen by this year\u2019s judges represent the very best in translated fiction, published in the English language in the UK and Ireland. The list includes:<\/p>\n