The File on H

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 169

Country: Albania

I picked up “The File on H” by Ismail Kadare from the library last weekend. The librarian suggested it to me, and being excited about the OT challenge, I only had to glance at “About the author” on the first page to pick it up. And I’m glad I did.

The story is set in the 1930’s in Albania which is then under the rule of King Zok, in a small Albanian province N— which is not particularly famous for anything, where nothing interesting ever happens until the arrival of two Irish-American scholars.

Bill and Max are in N—to record epic poems sung by Albanian highlanders and for this purpose bring along the tape-recorder (which was only recently produced and so a device unknown in these parts). Their aim is to show how Homer’s epics might have been taken from epic poems sung by rhapsodes – Homerian singers. Their pursuit of the last existing rhapsodies in the world takes them to an old inn on the outskirts of N--, where rhapsodes were said to stop during their itineraries.

The Albanian Minister of Interior and the local governor however find the scholar’s motives ridiculous and believe them to be spies. Every movement of the foreigners is watched by informers. Bill and Max succeed in meeting rhapsodies, recording different epics, studying the variations between each version, variations between an epic sung by the same rhapsode at different times and with time believe they have uncovered enough to establish their theory of a connection between Albania and Homer.

In the midst of this, they encounter a Serbian monk who visits them at the inn and is enraged by the fact that though the epics are sung in two languages – Albanian and Serb-Croatian, the scholars chose Albania for their study thus indicating (according to him) that Albanian epic is the original and his own land’s songs are but an imitation. He instigates fear in a local hermit Frok about the contraption that captures epics. This works, Frok and his followers later destroy all of the tapes and the recorder.

The story ends with the scholars discovering an epivent (a recent event sung as an epic song) which had till then eluded them. I’ll leave the details and the exact ending for readers to discover.

The province is alive with its set of characters – the governor’s wife who fantasizes about the young scholars, Dull Baxheja the informer whose flowery reports the governor admires and envies. There is an ever prevailing play between the aural and ocular senses in the epics when the scholars debate about the blind poet, and in more than one aspect of the main storyline.

While I found the story and the writing style (the translation, of course) enjoyable, I’m glad I read this book more due to the fact that it got me interested in Albania, the Balkan conflict, the war for precedence; after I read the book, I spent considerable time looking up on the history of the country, etc. (This kind of made up for the disappointment as I had imagined up a witty, comic ending from the gist and the book cover!) And for this reason, I’ll pick up Kadare’s other books later on when I get a chance.

Will I recommend this book? Well, yes, and it’s a short and engaging read anyway, you’ll find out if you like it soon enough :)

I plan to link this for the Global Voices Book Challenge prematurely because this book has managed to sustain my interest in the country much after I’ve turned over the last page, made for an apt read!

The Homeric Question was the primary concern of Harvard scholars Albert B Lord and Milman Parry who had brought back material of their studies based in Yugoslavia. Albert Lord later completed the treatise titled “The Singer of Tales”.

The author Ismail Kadare met Albert Lord in a conference in Turkey in 1979 and from this conversation grew the idea for “A File on H”.