The Accident by Ismail Kadare
Text, $39
Exactly how this accident occurs I'm not sure. The taxi driver doesn't seem to know either. He survives but his passengers - either a man and a woman, a man and a mannequin, or all three - are flung from the doors which open when the cab lurches off the road. The man and woman are killed and what happens to the mannequin or blow-up doll is unknown. That's if there was one. Nothing is quite certain in this story and yet it is riveting.
The accident occurs in that angst-ridden, plot-thickening region, the Balkans. So I began this story perplexed and remained perplexed as it moved along.
The male victim is Besfort Y, who probably worked for the European Commission as some sort of secret agent. The woman is his lover, Rovena, a beautiful woman whose life seems to consist almost entirely of being a beautiful woman trying desperately to work out why she is so besotted by Besfort Y, and so scared of him.
Because of Besfort Y's mysterious background, the secret services of Balkan countries start probing what otherwise seemed a mundane accident, and an unidentified "researcher" becomes the narrator.
Over a few years, Besfort Y and Rovena have assignations in hotels in many surrounding countries. The novel is entirely wrapped around the relationship of these two, with simple asides that help build up some substance to her existence, but not his. And so it goes on. Not much happens beyond that.
The obsession of so many modern novelists with complicated relationships, especially among middle-class Westerners, is something that usually, rapidly, turns me off. But I stayed with this story because I became a Kadare enthusiast with Agamemnon's Daughter, a subtle and enlightening tale of the way authoritarian states keep their citizens off-balance and fearful. Echoes of Kafka.
Gradually I became unable to put The Accident down. Every event and relationship is blurred and makes tricky demands on the reader's attention and imagination. I became absorbed by Rovena's fear and despair, by the capricious nature of her existence, transfixed by the tragic inevitability of her doom.
Ismail Kadare is Albania's best-known writer, brought up inside the fenced-off, Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2005, and has earned a big reputation with deeply interesting novels about characters with a vague, incomprehensible sense that they should be afraid without quite knowing what to be afraid of.
He writes with a plainness and understatement that concedes nothing to sentimentality.
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
