A review by nwhyte
The File on H by Ismail Kadare

http://nhw.livejournal.com/743751.html[return][return]It is short but very deep: the tale of two ethnographers visiting Albania in the 1930s during the rule of King Zog, to record ancient epic poetry (the H in the title stands for Homer). The two ethnographers are supposed to be Irish, but might as well be Japanese for the purposes of the story: the novel is about Albania, not about Ireland. (Perhaps it was in part a response to Andri's foreigners encountering Bosnia in The Days of the Consuls?)[return][return]But it's also about the construction of truth, how stories are told, especially when the state tries to regulate knowledge and information. Although the patriotic version of Albanian history - 1878, 1913 - is the only one told here, one senses that Kadar