Items related to The File on H.
Synopsis
For the first time in paperback, the acclaimed comic fable by ""one of the most compelling novelists writing in any language"" (Wall Street Journal). In the mid 1930s, two young Irish-American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder, in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as the Iliadand the Odysseywithout ever writing them down. The answer, they think, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic. But immediately on their arrival the scholars' seemingly arcane research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under the surveillance of a nearsighted informer with a prodigious gift for reproducing conversations he has overheard. He is soon generating a stream of floridly written reports about the visitors' puzzling activities. News of their presence in the provincial town of N------- sets gossip to flying, and while the town's governor speculates on their imminent capture, his pretty wife, from her bath, plots her delivery from a marital ennui worthy of Madame Bovary. Research and intrigue proceed apace, but it isn't until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question. Part spy novel, part comedy of errors, The File on H.is a work of inventive genius and piercing irony that may be Ismail Kadare's funniest and most accessible to date. From an author who has been called ""one of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language"" (Wall Street Journal),it is also a profound and eloquent comment on one of the most intractable conflicts of our time.
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Review
"Witty and touching. It consolidates Kadare's reputation as one of the finest writers to emerge from communist Europe" (Sunday Times)
"Eloquent, engaging and poignant" (Irish Times)
"A wicked and amusing satire of provincial life...it is also an elegiac celebration of the power of poetry" (Times Literary Supplement)
"Funny, strange, and melancholy" (Guardian)
"Knife-sharp satire...originality shines through" (The Times)
From the Publisher
A haunting yet humorous evocation of a society dangerously trapped in its past.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherArcade Pub
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1611452503
- ISBN 13 9781611452501
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages208
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