A Dictator Calls is based around Stalin’s alleged three-minute telephone call to Boris Pasternak in 1934. Who better than Kadare to write about it, given how he navigated the oppressive environment of communist Albania under dictator Enver Hoxha?
The discussion at the BookBlast® Translation Book Club, Hatchards, Piccadilly examined the relationship between dictators and writers; censorship; the power of fear, the game of divide and rule and everyone playing off each other; Osip Mandelstam and the gulag; Stalin’s purges of the intelligentsia; whether Stalin favoured Pasternak the way Lenin favoured Gorky; Putin’s regime today and the death of Anna Politkovskaya; methods of eliminating those who speak out against a dictator . . . The discussion includes insights from publisher Christopher MacLehose. [33 minutes]
Ismail Kadare in an interview with Duncan Fallowell (2004): ‘The most important tool of oppression for dictatorship was poverty. Little food, tiny apartments. People were given such narrow lives that they did not dare to think of anything else.’
Upcoming translation book club discussions at Hatchards, Piccadilly, meeting in person on the second Monday of each month at 6pm:
Monday 13 January
Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami (Pushkin Press)
“The book incorporates three short stories of an abstract and surreal nature which the translator Lucy North has managed to capture in this well thought-out and ambitious translation . . . ther seem to draw much more heavily on traditional Japanese folklore, mythology and superstition,£ Harry Martin, The Japan Society
Monday 10 February
Fathers and Fugitives by S J Naude (Europa)
“A novel of entanglements, interventions and failures, which constantly returns to the image of the fragile connection between child and parent,” Irish Times
“What a mesmerizing, moving book, written ― and translated by the wonderful Michiel Heyns ― with such crystalline clarity,” Neel Mukherjee, Bomb Magazine
Monday 10 March
Elena Knows by Claudia Pineiro (Charco Press)
“A highly accomplished and original novel, translated with great sensitivity to tone and atmosphere by Frances Riddle,” Irish Times
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