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Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Review

Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Ismail Kadare, often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, relies heavily in his fiction on the power of legends. One of his best novels, 1978’s BROKEN APRIL, is about the Kanun, an Albanian ritual whereby a family must avenge a member’s death by murdering a member of the killer’s family. Kadare returns to legend in TWILIGHT OF THE EASTERN GODS. Although this book is just coming out now, Kadare finished writing it in 1976. In his introduction, David Bellos, who translated the book from a 1981 French edition, writes that Kadare wrote the novel in fragments over 15 years and was dissatisfied with the incompleteness of the Albanian version. Kadare used the opportunity of the French translation to make corrections. TWILIGHT OF THE EASTERN GODS still feels fragmentary, but it’s an interesting insider view of one of the more famous periods of 20th-century literature.

In this semi-autobiographical work, Kadare describes the two years he spent (from 1958 to 1960) as a young graduate student at Moscow’s Gorky Institute. The mission of the Institute was to train the next generation of authors in the Socialist Realist school of writing --- literature that espoused the superiority of Communism, a system Kadare would later reject.

"...an interesting insider view of one of the more famous periods of 20th-century literature.... Kadare does a good job of making us feel what it was like to be a young student in Russia at the height of the Cold War."

The novel begins at a summer writers’ retreat in Riga, the Latvian capital. The 22-year-old narrator befriends a young woman whose ash-blonde hair reminds him of autumn sadness --- one of many lovely turns of phrase. In between their conversations about literature, he tells her the Albanian legend of Kostantin and Doruntine. A mother of nine sons allows her only daughter, Doruntine, to marry a foreign knight on the condition that the mother’s youngest son, Kostantin, promises to bring her back for weddings or funerals. All nine sons die in a war. The mother goes to Kostantin’s grave and curses him. He rises from the grave, brings his sister back, and then returns to his grave forever.

The narrator tells her this story to demonstrate the “incomparable beauty” of his country’s stories and legends. He refers to it frequently throughout the rest of the novel, using this legend as a counterpoint to the events unfolding in Russia when he returns to the Gorky Institute. We meet many of the narrator’s fellow exchange students, among them Latvians, Armenians, Stalinists, Lithuanians, Yakuts and Eskimos. Most had prominent careers before they came to the Institute; one of them was prime minister of the Caucasus.

Some of the novel is devoted to the narrator’s relationship with his medical-student girlfriend in Moscow, but the bulk of TWILIGHT OF THE EASTERN GODS consists of conversations about politics and literature between the narrator and other students. Their main topic in the book’s second half is Russia’s outraged reaction when the Swedish Academy gives the Nobel Prize in Literature to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO author Boris Pasternak. Unfortunately, Kadare doesn’t adequately convey the passions the award engenders. He quotes statistics --- 111 dailies and 74 periodicals published articles condemning Pasternak --- but he doesn’t tell us what they said or how their arguments influenced the narrator and his colleagues.

This is a problem throughout the book. There’s nothing wrong with quiet novels or novels of ideas, but Kadare doesn’t give his characters much to do. In a brief flashback, the narrator tells us that his girlfriend is one of the most interesting people he has ever met, but we never see why. The characters are sketchy, the conversations superficial. The narrator hears a damning radio broadcast against Pasternak, but we don’t hear its contents. We learn more about the political climate in 1950s Soviet Russia from Bellos’ introduction than we do from Kadare’s novel.

The book doesn’t have the intellectual complexity of other Kadare works, or a protagonist as multifaceted as, say, Adam Gordon from Ben Lerner’s LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION, an exceptional novel about a writer overseas. But Kadare does a good job of making us feel what it was like to be a young student in Russia at the height of the Cold War. The book is at its best when it gives us a taste of Russian life circa 1958: the affectionate diminutives the Russian press used to refer to Khrushchev, or the observation that, but for the GUM department store across from the Kremlin, Red Square would have no personality to speak of. If only the rest of the book had been as well drawn.

Reviewed by Michael Magras on November 14, 2014

Twilight of the Eastern Gods
by Ismail Kadare

  • Publication Date: November 4, 2014
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Hardcover: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Grove Press
  • ISBN-10: 0802123112
  • ISBN-13: 9780802123114