The Successor by Ismail Kadare: book review

Albanian author, Ismail Kadare, sets The Successor (2003) in his homeland in 1981. The man soon to succeed the dictator, Enver Hoxha, was shot dead on the night of December 13. The government announces his suicide due to “nervous depression.”

International press report two possibilities: suicide or murder.

In a time of upheaval in the Balkans when Outer Albania (Kosovo) had been put down and in a time when suicide was “a mortal stain,” intelligence analysts conduct an investigation into The Successor’s death.

It was said that The Successor’s decline began in September when he moved to a new residence and announced his daughter’s engagement. The suitor broke off the engagement. “People may have slaughtered each other, may have flayed each other alive, but not once had a wedding been postponed, let alone cancelled!”

An autopsy was conducted, but revealed nothing. Perhaps it was murder. Around midnight on the evening of his death, a man had been seen slipping into The Successor’s new residence, called the Bllok. Someone said he was holding something black “like an old kind of camera.” The case then turned to a door in the residence: a door with one-way hinges. Rumor then mounted that no autopsy was ever carried out, “not by oversight but intentionally.”

Conspiracy theories arose—The Successor sacrificed his daughter to initiate “a change of line” which “would have sounded the death knell for Albania.” Then the successor to The Successor was arrested.

This political murder mystery, with its rumors and tensions, rules no one understands, and dream-reality perspectives, will leave you guessing until the very last page.

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