654
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Composite Biography," Manea allows us to follow Camarade Vasile
Cotiga through multiple incarnations from 1945 through the 1970s,
"barricaded behind his stiff manner. A loner ... " We read his police
dossier, written in officialese, and peer at him through a series of refracted
lenses, as Cotiga shifts through a dozen or so names and pseudonyms, and
even more political stances and occupations. The narrated "reports" on
his colleagues and family, his transfers, promotions, treatments in sanatori–
ums (he's spied on even there), are bone-chilling. "We have in our pos–
session the articles he wrote during this period," one innocuous dossier
entry reads.
Manea subtly leaks out details about his characters - things even they
don't know about themselves - through confessions, overheard conversa–
tions, dreams, police files, and unsurprisingly, their nightmares. Amidst
the bizarre and even hilarious details of daily life under "that national
clown" Ceausescu, and despite their literary pyrotechnics and breathtak–
ing, sensual imagery, Manea's stories offer a horrific vision of a world
gone berserk from boredom, pain, and unending vigilance. We learn in
the volume's final story, "The Trenchcoat," that even death, subject to
new regulations, is no longer a simple matter: "The latest edict, regarding
the obligatory burial of deceased persons in the locality where they ren–
dezvoused with the Grim Reaper. You've heard about that, have you?"
Knowing that Albania's was an even more repressive regime than
Manea's Romania, we sense that Ismael Kadare didn't have to overtax his
imagination to invent his own vision of hell. "I kept weighing up what an
ambitious and over-fanciful proposal this was, though, after those un–
known Egyptians, after Virgil, Saint Augustine and, above all, Dante," he
has stated. But Kadare has succeeded: His Albanian hell makes even
Manea's and Urbanek's seem like mere prison furloughs. The author of
such critically acclaimed works as the autobiographical novel
Chronicle in
Stone
0987),
The General oj the Dead Army
(1991) and
Broken April (1990),
now exiled from Albania, Kadare was for many years the country's
"cultural ambassador." He has been a perennial candidate for the Nobel
Prize in Literature and is a best-selling author in France where he sought
political asylum in 1990, yet he is curiously all but unknown in America.
George Orwell would, I imagine, be impressed by the ovcrarching
metaphor of Kadare's new novel,
The Palace oj Dreams,
in which a totali–
tarian state monitors and analyzes its inhabitants' every dream. Privacy and
the rights to one's own thoughts here constitute a dream no one dares
have. Tabir Sarrail, the mysterious Palace of Dreams, stands at the epicen–
ter of its Sultan's power. Its primary function is to alert the Sultan of im–
pending doom, by monitoring and interpreting the symbols that appear in
his countrymen's dreams, which are collected daily. Absolute secrecy is
