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Book Cover for: The File on H., Ismail Kadare

The File on H.

Ismail Kadare

In the mid-1930s, two Irish Americans travel to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as The Iliad and The Odyssey without ever putting pen to paper. The answer, they believe, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining habitat of the oral epic.

But immediately upon their arrival, the scholars' seemingly arcane research excites suspicion and puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under surveillance and are dogged by gossip and intrigue. It isn't until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Arcade Publishing
  • Publish Date: May 9th, 2013
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.50in - 0.80in - 0.60lb
  • EAN: 9781611457995
  • Categories: LiteraryHistorical - GeneralCultural Heritage

About the Author

Kadare, Ismail: - Ismail Kadare is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, and is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He is acclaimed worldwide as one of the most important writers of our time. Translations of his novels have been published in more than forty countries. He divides his time between Paris, France, and Tirana, Albania.

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Praise for this book

As satiric and absurd as something by early Evelyn Waugh or Lawrence Durrell. The farce is sustained with touches of comic nightmare.
Kadare combines metaphysical inquiry with social realism . . . [and] a comic touch, though one dark and penetrating in the manner of Samuel Beckett's fiction.