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    The Accident: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Accident: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Accident: A Novel
    Ebook228 pages3 hours

    The Accident: A Novel

    By Ismail Kadare

    2.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare comes a dizzying psychological thriller of twisted passions, dual identities, and political subterfuge. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the war in the Balkans, The Accident closely documents an affair between two young lovers.

    On a rainy morning in Vienna, a taxi pulls onto the autobahn only to crash into the median barrier moments later, hurling its two passengersa man and a womanfrom the backseat as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; he only says that the mysterious couple seemed to be about to kiss.

    As the investigation into their deaths deepens, a lonely researcher will uncover a mutually destructive relationship that blurs the line between fact and fiction, fear and desire, and love and fixation over the course of twelve years. An alluring mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality, The Accident is a fever dream of a novel that marks a bold and fascinating departure from Kadare’s previous work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateNov 2, 2010
    ISBN9780802196194
    Unavailable
    The Accident: A Novel
    Author

    Ismail Kadare

    Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known novelist, whose name is mentioned annually in discussions of the Nobel Prize. He won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005; in 2009 he received the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2015 he won the Jerusalem Prize. In 2016 he was named a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur. James Wood has written of his work, "Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." His last book to be published in English, The Traitor’s Niche, was nominated for the Man Booker International.

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    Reviews for The Accident

    2.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Booker Man nternational Prize winning author for his wide impact on the world - this book is absolutely ghastly...inane dialogue by two personality disordered protagonists obsessed with sex and power, I assume it's a metaphor for Albania and its past tyrant or its future relationship with Europe - whatever it is - it is an unpleasant, clunky, clumsy book. I can't think that all the blame can be laid at the feet of the translator.
    • 2/5
      Like the previous reviewer I found this book hard to comprehend, especially compared with others of Kadare's books such as Broken April and Agamemnon's Daughter, which are quite terrifying in their clarity.
    • 3/5
      Well, this started out so promising - a strange traffic accident occurs that kills two people in a taxi when the driver sees that in the rear view mirror, they "try to kiss". Whaaa??? Then the story backtracks over the years of the two victims long love affair. And at the end? Well, I don't think I understood the end at all. Was it all real, imaginary, or supernatural? I just don't know.
    • 3/5
      A taxi goes off the road near Vienna airport, and the passengers, a man and woman, both Albanians, are killed. It looks like a tragic but banal road accident, but the file stays open, since on the one hand the Serbian and Albanian secret services are taking an interest - the man was a senior official of the Council of Europe - and on the other hand two friends have reported that the woman had told them she was afraid that the man, her lover, was about to murder her.As we dig deeper and deeper into the couple's back-story, we never seem to get any nearer to a coherent explanation of the facts. It is almost as though some novelist might be using them to make a satirical point about Albanian history: if intimate relationships reflect the societies they come out of, then a relationship between two modern Albanians must be grounded in abuse of power, weapons, role-playing, suspicion, betrayal (real, pretended, imagined), jealousy, historical guilt, atavistic fear of "The Hague", galloping horses, and a non-realist narrative logic derived from old ballads. I'm not sure about this book: Kadare is very good at what he does, and the way the story slides between factual crime-story, psychological reconstruction and bizarre magic-realism is very clever. However, the mix of politics and transgressive clandestine sex often makes you feel you're back in the bad old macho days of Milan Kundera, and then there's the narrator's curious obsession with lesbians... It's all presented ironically and critically from the woman's point-of-view, but I was left feeling that the irony was a bit half-hearted, and the voyeurism was what the author was really counting on to sell the book.