Twilight Of The Eastern Gods (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
I think I've read enough Kadare now to pinpoint the type of his writing I like the best: books about something he has direct experience with, but not books that border on the autobiographical. When he writes a story about something he has limited or no experience with, like The Pyramid or The Siege, the book doesn't rise to the heights of his works where he can draw upon his life experiences. When he writes something that's less a fictional story than a recounting of actual events, the structure of the work suffers and the writing isn't quite as lively, lyrical, or beautiful as normal. Chronicle in Stone only has these issues to a minor degree, as Kadare was writing of his childhood decades after the fact- and at that point, childhood is less an actual experience than a series of stories you've told yourself a thousand times before. Twilight of the Eastern Gods, however, is a book written while the memories were still fresh to Kadare, and so the book lacks the slight otherworldly mood present in many of his other works. The writing is also far more sterile than Kadare's usually is, meaning that, although there are still beautiful scenes and passages, there are fewer here than in other Kadare books. While the blurb on the flap of the book makes it sound as though there is an overriding story drawing parallels between Kadare and Pasternak, in fact Pasternak only becomes a central topic two-thirds into the book. Instead the main plot primarily concerns a failed relationship that is also a reimagining of an Albanian myth, though this main plot takes up far fewer pages than the space Kadare uses to recount vignettes and scenes from his time at the Gorky Institute. These scenes never come to a climax or resolution, and while some provide context and symbolic significance to the failing central romance, others don't, which leaves the book feeling somewhat disjointed and rambling. In sum, it's not bad, but it's a long way from my favorite Kadare. Going forward I'm going to prioritize his purely fictional works above any more of his semi-autobiographical works, though of course you'll have to give each a try to figure out if you share my preference.
In an era of self-publishing, self-publicising and social media onanism, the idea that a piece of writing might be censored before arriving in the public domain seems strange enough, but the concept of state-run censorship is positively archaic.The idea that a superpower could today manage to ban a book in any effective way seems impossible. Google may remove the odd link from its servers, with a vague nod towards the “right to be forgotten”, but anyone hoping to definitively hide information once it becomes publicly available faces a terrifyingly difficult task.World superpowers can no longer keep their military secrets in the bag, never mind censor books. If Edward Snowden can publish the CIA’s dirty laundry for the world to see, the state censorship of literature seems a quaint thing of the past. No longer would we tolerate the government telling us what we can or cannot read simply because we are so used to being able to read anything — at any place, at any time.It is therefore a strange and appropriately dusky world that readers enter when they start reading the first pages of Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods. Set at the end of the 1950s in Soviet Moscow, the writing instantly conjures a dreamlike sea of contradictions.... [Full review published at Litro Magazine http://bit.ly/1oCOwQv]
What do You think about Twilight Of The Eastern Gods (2014)?
A strange, lucid, sometimes alienating snapshot of life as a Soviet writer the year that Pasternak won the nobel prize. It feels ferociously contemporary in the way it veers between autobiography and invention, and there are some absolutely bravura sequences (the first chapter, in particular, is stellar). The blur of characters and detail and the occasional fevered sequence make things a bit confusing, and this is a classic case of one of my least favorite tropes: a male protagonist who impulsively acts badly/erratically as a function of plot alone. On the line level, it's pretty much extraordinary. In short: a strange one. Check it out if you have interest in non-Russian Soviet writers. They've been a low-level obsession of mine lately, and this is the best illustration so far of their constraints.
—Adam Dalva
Ismail Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods opens on an autumnal Baltic beach. The first chapter, one-fifth of this slim but profound novella, is exciting in the best kind of quiet way, and suggest that a master of place is at work. Only on arrival in Moscow does Kadare’s protagonist narrator confirm this suspicion. First, by conjuring trolleybuses powered by overhead cables “gliding past as great stags do in fairy tales.” Then, by throwing down a gauntlet with the declaration that “not a single Soviet novel contained anything like an exact description of Moscow.” Here is a dismissal of a whole generation of writers. But it is also a suggestion that I, as a novelist smitten with that city, can’t help but cheer: that foreigners are Moscow’s best scribes.
—Elizabeth Kiem
This is far more interesting as a snapshot of 1950s literary life in Moscow than as a novel, but it nevertheless held my attention and I was pleased to read something from the acclaimed Albanian writer, who based the book on his own two years spent at the prestigious Gorky Institute in 1958-1960. The novel opens with the narrator on a summer holiday in Riga at one of the Institute’s retreats where he meets Lida, who supplies most of the love interest. Back in Moscow we meet his fellow students, who mostly act like students do the world over, and get a glimpse of life in the student residence. What we don’t get is a look at the teaching in the Institute but it is quite possible that Kadare didn’t think it worth spending time on. The Institute's aim was to educate literary aspirants in the tenets of Socialist Realism rather than foster literary talent. The second part of the book concentrates on the furore caused by Pasternak being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the torrent of criticism from the establishment and the public that it sparked.There are cameo appearances by real people, such as Yevtushenko and other writers, and certainly the novel is atmospheric and a valuable slice of Moscow literary life, but as a novel there is little plot and little effective characterisation and it plods along quite tediously most of the time. The introduction from translator David Bellos is invaluable, as is the list of real people who appear, but essentially it’s a book for dedicated Russophiles or students of Russian literary life rather than the general reader.
—Mandy
