Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella & Stories

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From the winner of the first Man Booker International Prize comes a searing story of love denied, then shattered under the chilling wheels of the state. But as a fairly lowly worker in National Television, and because of his subversive, anti-regime views, the relationship was doomed and thus forbidden by the girl’s father. Through a wry and compelling set of ruminations on the grandstand, the journalist finds that a government that would deny young love denies humanity, and seeks the isolation of every citizen - which in turn pits neighbor against neighbor in a fever of paranoid denunciation.

Another example includes Iphigenia's brother, Orestes, discovering her identity and helping him steal an image of Artemis.While the usual ceremony of the regime’s self-glorification unfolds, our narrator suddenly sees—between the flags, the propaganda streamers, and portraits of the country’s leaders—the ghostly image of Agamemnon, the terrifying general of the ancient Greeks. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a pivotal moment in the tale of the House of Atreus—it motivates Agamemnon’s murder and in turn the matricide of Orestes—and the Trojan War, functioning as it does as a strange sacrifice of a virgin daughter of Klytemnestra in exchange for passage for a fleet to regain the adulteress Helen, Iphigeneia’s aunt by both her father and mother. In some ways, he is the iron curtain's equivalent of George Orwell (especially of course his Nineteen Eighty-Four ), except for the obvious difference that his experiences were first-hand. Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 - and his recipient's speech is included in this edition, and has been posted online. Written by Albania’s best known novelist, who experienced totalitarianism firsthand, all three are extremely spare in terms of plot, yet riveting.

It's a mild mannered protest about the length of someone's dress, taken facetiously by Party regulars who receive it Slowly, the complaint gathers momentum, is viewed seriously by higher ups until it triggers the harshest reaction possible within the regime, causing dictator Enver Hoxha to invoke his most brutal tool, the "blind purge" - a wild, illogical, all consuming passion to locate dissidents, suspected or real, terminate their careers, relationships, even the lives of people caught in its unfathomable web. In 1389, a battle was fought against the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo, ending in a momentous standoff that amounted to a defeat for the Balkan defenders.

Not all poets took Iphigenia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine," Kerenyi remarks, [5] "though it is certain that to begin with they served indifferently to address the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon. The world described is very much like Stalin's Russia, which, given that Albania went off on its own, makes me wonder: were all communist states so similar? The novella is told through the perspective of an unnamed television journalist with somewhat liberal views who is unexpectedly invited to the annual May Day Parade – aimed almost exclusively at glorifying the leader of the country – shortly after his girlfriend Suzana, daughter of the leader's designated successor, breaks up her relationship with him, citing his possible unsuitability and the fact it may tarnish her father's reputation. As such, it functions as "a portfolio of sketches of human ruination – a brief Inferno, in which victims of the regime are serially encountered" [2] by the narrator.

Possible reasons for key discrepancies in the telling of the myth by playwrights such as Euripides are to make the story more palatable for audiences and to allow sequels using the same characters. Instinctively he senses that his “sin” of loving will result in his own downfall, as Agamemnon’s was caused by sacrificing his daughter, Iphigenia. Identified with Agamemnon's story to which she is inextricably linked, the Classical figure of Iphigenia lends her myth to Kadare's novella and the account of her sacrifice becomes the guide for his hero.That same brother then poisoned the heart of the queen against her husband by telling her of the sacrifice (like Clytemnestra in the myth, she believed her daughter was taken away to marry a neighboring king). Aeschylean characters have always to face a situation that leads them to an aporia between divine necessity and human responsibility. It reveals a world where fear is an instrument of power, but the individual survives despite the odds. It was written during the dying days of Enver Hoxha‘s brutal regime, and smuggled out to a Parisian publisher 2 or 3 pages at a time (that story’s worth another novel all by itself). In some versions of the story, Iphigenia remains unaware of her imminent sacrifice until the last moment.