The Traitor's Niche

Praise forThe Traitor's Niche

The New York Times Book Review, Paperback Row
1 of 19 Translated Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer (Signature Reads)
1 of 46 Coolest Books of the Season (The Globe and Mail)
A Best Book for Summer 2017 (Daily Telegraph)

"The quest for a rebel pashaâEUR(TM)s severed head becomes a grimly comic comment in John HodgsonâEUR(TM)s translation of this brilliant and laconic 1978 Albanian novel, an allegorical fable about 20th-century authoritarianism." âEUR"The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

"IfA Girl in Exile, with its reckoning of the moral compromises made under totalitarianism, is typical of Mr. KadareâEUR(TM)s post-Communist writing,The TraitorâEUR(TM)s Niche (Counterpoint, 200 pages, $25) exemplifies the remarkable multilayered fiction he created during HoxhaâEUR(TM)s rule . . . LikeA Girl in Exile, the translation is by John Hodgson, who has superbly captured Mr. KadareâEUR(TM)s mixture of stark expository writing and sudden swerves into hallucinatory imagery . . . The bookâEUR(TM)s political intentions are shrewd and unmistakable. By depicting the corruption and whimsical cruelty of the Ottoman Empire, Mr. Kadare smuggles in a damning appraisal of Albanian Communism . . . Its evocation of the past feels both contemporary (tourists flock to Istanbul to gawk at the severed head, and you can almost imagine them taking cellphone photos) and outside of time. Mr. Kadare has more in common with William Faulkner, a writer who spins mythology out of regional legends. This, too, is a moral project as well as an artistic one. InThe TraitorâEUR(TM)s Niche, Mr. Kadare delineates the Ottoman EmpireâEUR(TM)s efforts to vouchsafe subservience by expunging Albania of its language and customs. This unforgettable novel adds to his lifelong work of cultural reclamation. The past is uncannily present in his booksâEUR"a phantom that walks among the living, or a severed head that seems to lock you in its gaze." âEUR"The Wall Street Journal

"The novel relentlessly exposes the impact of authoritarianism, showing how it crushes the human spiritâEUR"including, perhaps most perniciously, the souls of those who aspire to be autocrats. Reading the book today, one can understand the response it provoked from the communist censors, since its critique, though displaced in time, is clearly directed at HoxhaâEUR(TM)s regime. Yet the story is also a more encompassing parable of authoritarianism that is relevant far beyond its immediate historical moment . . . Kadare also shows a unique talent at peering inside the mind of a tyrant . . . InThe TraitorâEUR(TM)s Niche, as in all his best works, Kadare powerfully evokesâEUR"and critiquesâEUR"the sheer, irascible strangeness of unchecked power." âEUR"Los Angeles Review of Books

"Finally (and very elegantly) translated . . . Riveting." âEUR"The New York Times Book Review

"Forty years after its publication in Albanian, the English translation by John Hodgson is effective in relaying the creative naturalism of his informal, though skillfully poetic, idiosyncratic tone . . . KadareâEUR(TM)s fiction intuits the spirt of the art movements of his day, orbiting the dark ambiance of indie cinema, goth punk, shock installation. The gift of Kadare as a writer is also not merely in the aesthetics of his language, but in the rudimentary transmission of deft, witty meaning, and deeply satirical commentary." âEUR"Matt Hanson,The Millions

"Kadare'sTraitor's Niche is a short, rich, thickly described indictment of empire, nationalism, and the state, a timely meditation on the violences of bureaucracy, corruption, and the injustice of justice." âEUR"PopMatters

"This is a mesmerising story filled with rapidly drawn, memorable characters and vivid descriptions of architecture and desolate landscapes. It is a fable while also a portrait of subjugation." âEUR"The Financial Times

"Although on the surface this is a deeply compelling historical novel, its scope is wider. At heart, what Kadare seeks to demonstrate is the terrible nature of a world in which every human element is suborned to the state . . . Kadare well deserves his growing European audience." âEUR"Daily Telegraph

"An extraordinary and complex novel whose time has come . . . 40 years after its initial publication [in Albanian.]" âEUR"Herald

"The baroque madness of the Ottoman bureaucracy is beautifully drawn, and the characters are sketched well. Each time you find yourself hoping against hope that you aren't meeting the next occupant of the niche." âEUR"Historical Novel Society

"In John Hodgson's lucid translation,The Traitor's Niche is absorbing from start to finish. Kadare's allegorical burlesque has rarely been so trenchant." âEUR"Spectator

"The novel is a hymn to language, something that, as Ottoman bureaucrats intent on obliterating it instinctively know, and as Kadare's novels prove, is not easily silenced." âEUR"Claire Allfree,Daily Mail

âEURoeForty years after its original publication in Albanian, Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail KadareâEUR(TM)s book is finding an enthusiastic readership in English. Translated by John Hodgson, this allegorical novel of tyranny and rebellion is set in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, but its story of subordination to the state is timeless. 'Kafka on a grander political scale,' said theThe Sunday Times.âEUR âEUR"The Globe and Mail, One of the Coolest Books of the Season

"[A] bewitching novel." âEUR"Daily Telegraph, Best Books for Summer 2017

"As in many of Kadare's novels, there is an interplay between repressive silence and the insatiable need to speak. The empire's powerful bureaucratic apparatus is set on eliminating national languages and repressing dissident memories. Still, folk stories, gossip and niggling questions can't be controlled . . . It's possible that Kadare, now 80, won't be granted the Nobel Prize for Literature. YetThe Traitor's Niche shows how surely his best novels warrant it." âEUR"The National

"The Traitor's Niche . . . in a superb translation by John Hodgson, encompasses the whole of Albania and sweeps through the Ottoman landscape, offering a damning indictment of the nature of empire and its effects on subjugated peoples. The banning of language and culture; the loss of personality and autonomy; the obliteration of memory; the denigration of native myths and legends: these things will be familiar to many colonised peoples. Kadare captures all this and more in his unique style . . . which suffusesabsurdity and tragedy." âEUR"The Literary Review

"Aside from the gallows (or should that be guillotine?) humour and the wry send-up of the mechanical banalities of governance, this novel is principally concerned with those signature Kadare preoccupations: nationhood, tyranny and memory. Kadare's engagement with these themes earned him the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for a body of work in 2005." âEUR"The Irish Times

"Kadare offers a representation of the nature of fascism and warfare that digs below the surface, that allows for a deeper understandings of political processes, and that could help conceptualise this new era of racialised neo-nationalism that we stand at the precipice of today." âEUR"Wasafiri

"The narrative unfurls with the shifting intensity of a dream, enriched by unsettlingly surreal details . . . It is a brilliant examination of the way that authoritarian structures operate: Kafka on a grander political scale." âEUR"Sunday Times

"With its allegorical style, dark humor, and muscular commentary on contemporary Albania under Enver Hoxha, it is very much classic Kadare." âEUR"Booklist

"Kadare brilliantly examines the private cost of despotism while illustrating a crucial episode in the history of Albania. KadareâEUR(TM)s powerful, nimble novel is a gem." âEUR"Publishers Weekly

"A political fable of decapitation amid totalitarian oppression combines wickedly funny satire with darker, deeper lessons . . . The only signs that it's set in the early 19th century are offhand references to Byron and Napoleon; otherwise it reads less like historical fiction than timeless prophecy, as it anticipates the relentless expansion of an empire." âEUR"Kirkus Reviews

"This piercingly beautiful work quietly delivers a persuasive sense of human violence." âEUR"Library Journal

Praise for Ismail Kadare

"Kadare is inevitably linked to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." âEUR"The New Yorker

"The name of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare regularly comes up at Nobel Prize time, and he is still a good bet to win it one of these days . . . He is seemingly incapable of writing a book that fails to be interesting." âEUR"The New York Times

"Ismail Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness." âEUR"The Los Angeles Times

"[Kadare's] fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny . . . But his books are of more than just political statementâEUR"at his best he is a great writer, by any nation's standards." âEUR"Financial Times

"Kadare's fiction evades ideologies, escaping into richer realms of the past, or myth, folklore and dystopian fantasy." âEUR"Spectator

"Ismail Kadare is this generation's Kafka." âEUR"Independent

"He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka, and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil." âEUR"Independent on Sunday

"Ismail Kadare made his name as a forceful example of how to function as a writer under late communism. He trod a delicate line between censorship and lies by critiquing the Stalinism of Enver Hoxha's Albania through fable, allegory and historical transposition, sometimes throwing the dictator a bone, and escaping dissident status by virtue of his international success." âEUR"Independent

"A Master storyteller." âEUR"John Carey, author ofThe Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life

"One of the world's greatest living writers." âEUR"Simon Sebag Montefiore, author ofOne Night in Winter