The File on H. by Ismail Kadare: book review

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist and he does not disappoint with The File on H (2010) - this satirical tale of espionage, history, and musical entrapment.

In the mid-1930s, two Irish-American scholars journey to the Albanian highlands with a new, large, heavy invention: the tape recorder. Their academic mission was to discover how Homer could have composed works of brilliance and as long-worded as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” without ever putting pen to paper. For this mystery to be revealed, they travel to Albania, the last remaining habitat of the oral epic to record people reciting and singing the grand epics.

Before they arrived in the country, the visa approval officer suspected them of being spies and duly noted this in his records. And, just as duly, the order came to place the two Irishmen under 24-hour surveillance.

In the centre of ethnic strife in the Balkans, Bill Norton and Max Ross are mistaken for foreign spies. The locals are suspicious of them and their “weird, previously unheard of contraption” that saves voices in a box – voices that can be heard again and again. The box “bleeds black bile” of magnetic tape.

Dull Baxhaja, the appointed surveillance officer and informer, writes regular reports on the foreign spies for to the governor. The governor and his wife, Daisy, host a ball for the Irishmen, and Daisy becomes fascinated with their research. She imagines herself in the arms of one of them. She sees them as a romantic distraction from her boring, lonely, childless marriage. Her attempts to re-establish contact with them fails. Instead, and as a way of meeting the Irishmen again, she sends a note to the informer to request him to meet with her “on an important matter” at 11:00am. Strangely, at 11:00am, Dull Baxhaja resigns after months of surveillance. On the same night, bandits enter the Irishmen’s hotel and smash their equipment – “broken beyond repair.”

Funny, witty, farcical, clever, imaginative … the words of Kadare conjure up images of comic proportions amid suspicious, dark, undertones.

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