The File on H.

　　Part spy novel, part comedy of errors, The File on H. is Kadare’s funniest and most accessible work to date.

　　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.



 

作者簡介

　　Ismail Kadare, born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border, is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. He has lived in France since 1990, following his decision to seek asylum. From 1986, under the Communist regime, Mr. Kadare’s work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher, Editions Fayard, and stored in safe keeping for later publication. Translations of his novels have since been published in more than forty countries. In addition to Broken April, Ivan R. Dee also publishes his novels Doruntine and The General of the Dead Army. Mr. Kadare is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize 2005.