So like pretty much everyone else, I read this book as part of my reading around the world challenge for Albania. This wasn't my intended Albania book. I had hoped to find a book about Albanian religious history since I know Albania has a long and fascinating history involving religious freedom and tolerance. However, it seems this is the author all Albanians recommend so I succumbed to it. So Broken April has three main characters. First, we meet Gjorg. Gjorg has just murdered a man as part o So like pretty much everyone else, I read this book as part of my reading around the world challenge for Albania.
Gjorg has just murdered a man as part of his family's blood feud. He now has a month to live while knowing after this month is over, he will be murdered by a relative of his victim. Next, we meet Bessian and Diana. They are a married couple traveling around the Albanian mountains. Bessian sees much beauty in the blood feud traditions while Diana is horrified. For a lack of better word, this book is strange. It's very literary, which I usually don't like.
It's one of those books where there's isn't much of a plot and where we never get to see more than a skin deep view of the characters. I am still confused as to whether Bessian and Diana are Albanians or not so it might be a problem with my own reading or it just never gets entirely explained.
It's also not clear when this book is set. Something about the entire thing feels more like a fantasy land than an actual depiction of a countryside. To be entirely honest, I didn't like this book but I don't have any good reason why. I suppose it felt like it didn't quite progress anywhere.
It's hard to feel for any character. Bessian and Diana seem like strangers, there's no chemistry between them and I couldn't believe that they're married. Gjorg was promising but it was hard to care about him because we never really see him as a person. I don't feel like I know who he is, other than another participant in a blood feud. He doesn't even seem to be sad about his brother's death. And this is such a missed opportunity because a brief look at Kanun's Wikipedia page left me very intrigued.
Blood feuds were still a thing in Albania in , although their communist leader tried to put an end to it in his time. This is wild. It is also a huge political question. If an entire society agrees to a specific set of laws, can a government actually force them to stop? At this point, it seems to be such a cultural heritage and obviously, way too many people have died for nothing but is it the government's job to make this stop?
This book doesn't provide any kind of analysis, other than Bessian being somewhat of a psychopath. All in all, this just wasn't the book for me. Kadare was trying to create a specific mood here but I just wasn't feeling it.
Maybe studying this book in a literature class would work better but I can't say I'm finishing this book with a strong urge to read more of his work. What I'm Taking With Me - Bessian is absolutely the type of guy who makes excuses for rapists, like "men are just built to rape, this is human nature". I am a delight to travel with, in case anyone was wondering. Work Adventures after 3 months of not working : - I was an awkward mess for the first 20 minutes because I literally forgot how to socialize, I'm just here like, how do people even speak?
Sep 10, Ataur Rahman rated it liked it. When reading this book I recalled "Blindness" of Saramago. Broken April is haunting, dark, disturbing and yet strangely attractive.
The narration is so matter of fact yet the chill of death is looming in every word. It is the story of the relentless Kanun holding sway over the Albanian mountainsmen. The currency of the Kanun is death and so death seems as ever-present as money is in our society. There is always a sense of weirdness and unreality in the way the Mountainsmen deal with death, reveng When reading this book I recalled "Blindness" of Saramago.
There is always a sense of weirdness and unreality in the way the Mountainsmen deal with death, revenge, honour, realtionships,obeisance. Yet there is the uncanny feeling that our so called modern society is perhaps no different in the way it kills and mechanises death.
The only difference, perhaps, is the great democracy of death under Kanun in contrast to the modern ritual democracy coupled with hypocrisy of patriotism and other isms which send the young, meek, gullible, poor into the jaws of death View all 8 comments. Jul 14, Sarah rated it it was amazing Shelves: balkans , albania.
Just about the most depressing book I have ever read: powerful, bleak and timeless. It's sometime in post-Ottoman, pre-Hoxha Albania and a blood feud is playing itself out through the eyes of a young mountaineer, who is hopelessly caught in the game, while a couple of urban honeymooners are rubbernecking their way around the High Plateau. Then it gets a bit Passage to India as done by Kafka.
And it's drizzling in the grey mountains, where the widow in black sits by the road above the vill Jings. And it's drizzling in the grey mountains, where the widow in black sits by the road above the village where all the men are hiding in towers.
We haven't had time to do it in much depth but I at least have had a deeper plunge into it, and frankly, it's a towering thing. Truly great European literature with rich, layered images and subtle, devastating truths. Not all of Kadare is like this, and so far in my reading this is by far the best. I'm still blown away. This time I particularly found Mark Ukacierra to be interesting. Dec 10, Tara Newton rated it it was amazing.
A visceral breakdown of emotions. A darkness of souls. A terrific relationship between the eye and the world. Beautiful climax. A film. View 1 comment. However, I thought a particular plot device, an ancient book of laws and social mores which is the source of the problems that the main character, Gjorg Berisha, endures, was a fictional invention of the author.
Ffs, what real-life culture would codify into their common law rules about ritual assassinations, a cascading continuation of murder after murder of selected individuals to be passed down from generation to generation?
No society would make up such an idiotic Code! No, never happened! Uh, wait The mind-boggling discoveries I made after googling some of the elements in this translated story, written in , are that ritual blood feuds actually happened in Albania's past and are STILL happening today in the rural areas and mountains of Albania.
Plus, an ancient book of laws and mores, a book called the Kanun which describes how when and where these murders should occur, along with required ritual chanting which must be performed while murdering, is actually a real book STILL followed religiously by some rural villages in Albania! The descriptions of what this ancient book contains remind me of parts of the Qu'ran, Bible and Torah, only WAY more bizarre since the laws in this book demand people follow additional social rules of ritual murder that seem insane to me.
Any kind of death, whether accidental or intentional, begins an endless spiral of ritualized murder which must be performed within a year to restore the dead person's family's or village's honor. The dead person who is being avenged does not even have to be known to anyone in the village where the person died. The person who died could be a total stranger who was a temporary guest of a villager, like a thirsty traveler stopping to ask for a drink of water, who then was attacked by an unknown robber after leaving the village.
The villager, not the unknown robber, becomes responsible for satisfying the Code of Blood Feud as stated in the Kanun. Unbelievably, there is a traditional legal system set up in the participating villages of Albania to adjudicate the Code. Certain Albanian elders are judged to be sufficiently learned in interpreting the laws of the Kanun.
These gentlemen are sent for whenever there is a question who should be killed in response to a death, and who should be the 'justicer', as the murderer is officially named. It does not matter if the honor murder is performed on an innocent man or a guilty one as long as the selected individual satisfies the Kanun laws and rituals. The murder must be undertaken only in certain areas of a home or a town, in certain times of the day, within a year.
A person selected to be murdered can travel safely while on certain designated roads and paths, but as soon as that person leaves the 'safe' road or path, then that person can be murdered. There are also designated 'safe houses', which actually are towers made of stone built here and there across the landscape in Albania.
These towers are full of ex-justicers who are now vulnerable to revenge in the chain of murders in these blood feuds. These men can never leave the tower without fearing a bullet to the head.
The Code requires that a murdered man's death must be avenged, and then that person's murder must be avenged, and then that murder must be avenged, and then that murder must be avenged, etc.
Literally forever. I am not joking or exaggerating. In addition, if the murder is bungled, and only wounds are sustained by the selected person to have been murdered, then the justicer has to pay the victim a fine for each wound. Or they could count the wound as part settlement of the blood that was owed. In that case, the justicer can inflict wounds until the blood account was fully paid. Else, the clock is still ticking when the murder must occur by the justicer on the victim, and a fine is still owed the victim for each wound.
Once the justicer accomplishes his blood-feud revenge murder, then he must pay a death tax to the local authorities the authority who is in charge of collecting the blood tax is called 'The Steward of the Blood'.
The justicer can be granted the short bessa - a hour truce by the murdered man's family, or the murdered man's family can agree to giving the justicer a month-long truce - the long bessa. At the end of the bessa , the justicer can be killed by another appointed justicer in revenge, unless he goes to live in a tower of refuge, unable to ever leave the tower for the rest of his life.
Traditional law is a bitch, gentle reader. Another character in the novel, Bessian Vorpsi, is a journalist. He is on his honeymoon with his beautiful wife, Diana, traveling to the high plateaus of the Albanian mountains. They both are modern urbanites, but Bessian has always wanted to see the Code at work.
He thinks the Kanun is a romantic relic of Albanian history, majestic and legendary. But as their journey proceeds, he is puzzled more and more by Diana's behavior. As they pass men wearing black ribbons, the sign of the wearer being part of a blood feud and thus a walking dead man, Diana becomes withdrawn.
Was it a mistake to have a honeymoon in the mountains? She did not know much about the Code, but as he explains it to her as they travel, she gets quieter and quieter. What is wrong? Does she not see it is the glorious choice of Shakespeare's Hamlet made large? Author Ismail Kadare is probably unknown to most of us, gentle reader. But he is famous in Europe, especially in France and Albania. In he won the Man Booker International Prize. He also has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He was born in Albania and went to University in Tirana, Albania. Because of governmental disapproval of his books and other writings, he asked for and was granted asylum in in France.
At first, I believed I was reading only a historical fiction novel about the culture of Albania that existed long ago in the past, and later, as I progressed deeper into the story of 'Broken April', I thought maybe it was also a symbolic folktale of Albania because of the novel's literary architecture. The story is not only those things. Instead, I learned that Kadare's story about the early 20th-century Albanian mountain and village people of the past is a real-life culture of people who still live outside of the legal governmental framework of Albania as if they were in the midst of the Middle Ages and not part of the 21st century.
I read that 'Broken April' takes place between the World Wars, but it is difficult for me to believe that. The people of the Albanian plateaus live like people of the 13th century, in my opinion.
The protagonists travel by horse and carriage, horseback and of course, on foot. However, on page 35, Gjorg Berisha, one of the main characters, sees an airplane in the sky flying overhead, and knows what it is. I am still in shock by this story. Gjorg has a grace period or truce: bessa of thirty days before he becomes fair game for the bullet of his victim's family.
Should a member of the victim's family kill Gjorg, this will restore their honor. Gjorg's story was the most fascinating--the murder, what he does in his time of reprieve, and his final shocking though inevitable fate.
I felt Bessian was only a mouthpiece to explain the Kanun , the rigid set of laws governing every aspect of life and death of the mountain folk. Diana represented an outsider's view of the culture and Mark represented officialdom upholding the Kanun. This was a glimpse into a violent, brutal culture.
Remote Albania still lives under its tenets in the present. The simple, unvarnished style made it readable in a short time for me. This dark short novel is a good introduction to Kadare. I did reread the novel and it was just as good the second time. May 09, Anna rated it really liked it Recommended to Anna by: Suzy. Shelves: albanian-lit , fiction. They codify nearly all interpersonal behaviour, including the pretexts for and progression of blood feuds. I've no idea to what extent Kadare fictionalised a set of laws that genuinely existed, but the consequences of the Kanun as depicted are blood-curdling.
The narrative gives the perspectives of several characters, whose lives intersect only briefly. The first is Gjorg, 'Broken April' is a short novel examining the Kanun , a set of traditional laws that dominate life in the Albanian mountains. The first is Gjorg, a man embroiled in a blood feud which started due to no action of his family and has already claimed 44 lives when the book begins.
After murdering the man who killed his brother, Gjorg travels to pay the blood tax. He views the Kanun as one trapped by its most brutal dictates and unable to break free. The next perspectives are external, from a couple who have travelled into the mountains for their honeymoon. Both have read about the Kanun , but not seen it in practise before. Despite their social distance from what they observe, both are more moved by practical reality of blood feuds than they can articulate to themselves, let alone each other.
The briefest perspective, yet for me the most memorable, is that of Mark Ukacierra, steward of the blood. His role reminded me very much of The Gormenghast Novels. He collects the blood tax and worries that murders and thus revenue have declined. While he attempts to repress awareness of the appalling inhumanity of his job, this emerges via symptoms of physical illness.
The plot of the novel is slender, although it is bookended by violent deaths. There are no twists or surprises, as the Kanun renders events inexorable. Kadare explores with great delicacy how an ostensibly horrific legal system can be understood and upheld. Here, the newly married couple discuss guesthood: "A guest is really a demi-god," he went on after a while, "and the fact that any one at all can suddenly become a guest does not diminish but rather accentuates his divine character.
The fact that this divinity is acquired suddenly, in a single night simply by knocking at a door, makes it even more authentic. The moment a humble wayfarer, his pack on his shoulder, knocks at your door and gives himself up to you as your guest, he is instantly transformed into an extraordinary being, an inviolable sovereign, a law-maker, the light of the world. And the suddenness of the transformation is absolutely characteristic of the nature of the divine.
Did not the gods of the ancient Greeks make their appearance suddenly and in the most unpredictable manner? That is just the way the guest appears at an Albanian's door. Like the gods he is an enigma, and he comes directly from the realms of destiny or fate - call it what you will. A knock at the door can bring about the survival or extinction of whole generations. That is what the guest is to the Albanians of the mountains. He pretended not to have heard her and simply smiled, but with the cold smile of someone who intends to skirt what might well be the real subject of discussion.
And the steward of the blood contemplating his work: At times, Mark had thought of mad things that he dare not confess to anyone. Oh, if only the women as well as the men were subject to the rules of blood-letting. Then he was ashamed, even terrified - but that seldom happened, only sometimes at the end of the month or quarter, when he felt despondent because of the figures in the ledger.
Weary as he was, he would try to put those ideas from him, but his mind could find no respite and he went back to them. But this time, in going back to them, it was not to blaspheme the Kanun but simply to give vent to his astonishment.
He thought it very strange that weddings, which were usually occasions for joy, often brought about quarrels which led to feuding, while funerals, which were necessarily sad, never led to anything of the kind.
That led him to compare the ancient blood-feuds with those of recent times. On both sides of the comparison, there was both good and bad. This is a bleak, haunting, and beautifully written novel. Also by Ismail Kadare. Praise for Broken April. Broken April, a haunting account of the paroxism of the vendetta in northern Albania between the wars, is one of the twin peaks of Kadare's career Observer The story is plain, the telling plainer, yet the overall effect is mysterious and elusive as only a fable can be Guardian With Broken April Mr Kadare comes to the forefront as a major international novelist New York Times Forcefully and simply written Kadare is perhaps the last 'national writer' of European history Independent.
Related titles. To Kill A Mockingbird. Pride and Prejudice. Brave New World. Crime and Punishment. Little Women. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Secret Garden. The Power of the Dog. The Count of Monte Cristo. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Written by Ismail Kadare , this captivating tale of culture and society follows the story of two honeymooners traveling the mountains of Albania and a young man who must follow the laws of the Kanun or the mountain law.
Following the laws, Gjorg Berisha avenges his brother by killing the man who murdered him. However, according to the Kanun it is a right of custom for the family of the dead man to murder Gjorg after a day truce or bessa.
Gjorg's bessa will expire in mid-April and he decides to spend the start of the month traveling through the mountains, but first he must pay the 'blood tax' to the ruling family in a faraway village.
0コメント