“A terrific wind has caught the ship of my destiny & brought it to this strange shore..."
Located near the Galata tower, the jail has seen much change over the past 100 years, and was once a school, a shop, a warehouse and a factory. Today, it houses the offices of the heritage architects who have restored the building. The architects also run a traditional restaurant here, and have furnished the restaurant to resemble what houses in Istanbul looked like back in the 1890s.
Anyway. I guess this post started with a quote from Istanbul because I wanted to have something about the Ottoman empire, since its about Ismail Kadare, an Albanian writer. I just finished reading Kadare's seminal work, Palace of Dreams. Lauded by many as his most damning indictment of the tyranny of oppressive governments, the book is set within the Tabir Sarrail, (or Palace of Dreams), a governmental ministry tasked with analysing, collating and interpreting all the dreams ever dreamed in the Ottoman empire.(Click here for book details. SPOILER WARNING - Plot details follow)
First published in 1981 in Albania, The Palace of Dreams was immediately banned for its purported criticism of a government that was so totalitarian that it did not spare the population's subconscious from scrutiny. The protagonist, Mark-Alem, hailing from a politically powerful noble family, joins the Palace as a new recruit, and through the course of the story rises meteorically through the ranks. His progression is less driven by natural ability - it is rather through the patronage of his powerful uncle, the Vizier. Mark-Alem's own political ascension is countered by his family's sudden decline into political disfavour, and the novel ends with a sense of everything being a zero-sum game.
Critics have called The Palace of Dreams Kadare's most powerful critique of intellectual and political dictatorship. Pointing to how its ban and Kadare's subsequent fall from political grace eventually led to his seeking political asylum in France seven years later, many believe that Kadare's place in Albanian history as the voice of intellectual freedom is guaranteed.
I find this claim troubling, essentially driven by Kadare's own legacy in Albanian communism. He was a senior member of Enver Hoxha's political establishment, and used his own literary skills for an oppressive regime by acting as its PR writer. Later, he was appointed deputy in Albania's parliament - an institution that merely served as rubber stamp to Hoxha's policies.
The Palace of Dreams echoes this political privilege. Mark-Alem is never far from political patronage and the influence of his maternal uncles and his family legacy. His family's political conflicts with the Ottoman Sultans have adverse consequences for them, but it does not prevent them from producing several high ranking Viziers for the same dispensation, closely mimicking Kadare's own complex relationship with the Hoxha regime.
Kadare has come out on record to state that given the political climate within Albania at the time, the only space for dissidence was through literature like The Palace of Dreams. Again, this claim does not ring as true as it might, given that Kadare is also the author of works like The Great Winter, which many read as a tribute to Hoxha and his legacy.
The politics of a particular novel are always suspect, depending on which side of the political spectrum you view any single written work from. However, Kadare has built a strong reputation worldwide as an Albanian writer of significance. You can't question his literary worth - the quality of translation is probably more suited to another post, but considering the abundance of Albanian translators, this is probably excusable. I find it difficult to digest when we try to edify Kadare as the ultimate political dissident in Europe, especially when we compare him to writers like Milan Kundera & Boris Pasternak.
