Twilight of the Eastern Gods

Description

1958. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author, Boris Pasternak, faces exile, the press hound him and demand that he refuse the award. A few days earlier the young writer found a copy of this book - could those simple pages really be so dangerous? Based on Ismail Kadare's own experience, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city, a story of youthful disenchantment and a reminder of the incredible importance of the written word.

Born in 1936, Ismail Kadare is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. In 2005 he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize for 'a body of work written by an author who has had a truly global impact'. He is the recipient of the highly prestigious 2009 Principe de Asturias de las Letras in Spain. David Bellos is director of the Program in Translation at Princeton University and the author of Is That A Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation. He won the French-American Foundation's Translation Prize for his version of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, and the Goncourt Prize for Biography for Georges Perec. A Life in Words. He has translated seven of Ismail Kadare's novels as well as works by Romain Gary, Georges Simenon, Daniel Anselme and Georges Perec.

* Ismail Kadare is this generation's Kafka Independent * Compelling ...absorbing ...deeply personal ... With a new transation of Twilight of the Eastern Gods, Ismail Kadare is finally receiving the recognition he deserves New Statesman * Kadare writes ... with a light of touch and with consummate literary skill. This is the work of a strange and mysterious master Sunday Business Post * One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language Wall Street Journal * Enigmatic and beguiling ... pockmarked with brilliance The National * Fascinating ... Twilight of the Eastern Gods is reflective of a culture of paranoia and suspicion, in which anyone who made a wrong move or uttered anything that might be deemed subversive could expect reprisals Herald * One of the world's greatest living writers -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * Like Coetzee's Youth ... For its poetry, its pastiche and its tonic bitterness, this is a book that was worth redeeming ... It smacks gorgeously of the bitchiness that pervaded Soviet literature The Times * Skilfully mixes the personal and the political ... [Kadare is] a forceful example of how to function as a writer under communism Independent * His fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny ... great writer, by any nation's standards Financial Times * There are very few writers alive today with the depth, power and resonance of this remarkable novelist Herald * One of the most important voices in literature today Metro * Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness Los Angeles Times * Frequently hilarious ... Puts me in mind of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives locked in a freezer, or a version of Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. set in a Brooklyn where it was always snowing, all the young writers in the city lived in the same building, everyone regularly consumed debilitating quantities of vodka and each was suspected of being a government informer ... I intend to keep laying an annual GBP20 bet of Mr. Kadare [to win The Nobel Prize for Literature] for as long as he lives New York Times * Highly atmospheric Times Literary Supplement