This week in the magazine, in a piece called "Chronicles and Fragments," James Wood reviews Ismail Kadare’s novel The Accident. Reading it, I recalled John Updike’s review of Kadare’s Chronicle in Stone (“Chronicles and Processions,” The New Yorker, March 14, 1988; included in Updike’s 1991 collection Odd Jobs). Wood looks at Chronicle in Stone in his piece, as well. To my knowledge, this is one of the few times these two great critics have reviewed the same book, so it’s interesting to compare their approaches.
Kadare’s story is set in the medieval city of Gjirokastër in southern Albania during the Second World War. The city is real, but the way that the novel’s young narrator describes it, it’s also magical. Updike, in his piece, says: “A child’s self-centered, metaphoric way of seeing generates a constant poetry.” You can tell from the passages Updike quotes that it’s the poetry of the story that delights him. For example, he quotes Kadare's descriptions of roofs ("grey slates like gigantic scales), customs (brides' faces are decorated with "starlike dots, cypress branches, and signs of the zodiac, all floating in the white mystery of powder"), and city life ("Again the tender flesh of life was filling the carapace of stone").
Wood, in his review, doesn’t mention the poetic qualities of Kadare’s writing. Instead, it’s the comedic aspects of Chronicle in Stone that catch his attention. For example, Wood says, “War arrives, in the form of Italian bombing, British bombing, and, finally, the dark rondo whereby Greek and Italian occupiers arrive and depart from the stage like vicars in an English farce.” He says that in the story, “the memory of the past is regularly burlesqued.” He quotes a passage from the novel describing disoriented Crusaders marching past Gjirokastër, and says,
There is something Monty Pythonish about the Crusaders, miles-off-course, demanding to see the Holy Sepulchre, and the link to the hopelessness of the modern soldiers is deftly made. The city stands stonily against the new invaders, as it always has: that is Kadare’s own “chronicle in stone.”
Both critics admire the way Kadare blends legend and reality. Wood likens Kadare to José Saramago, and says they’re both “post-modern traditionalists.” Updike also refers to Saramago. He compares Chronicle in Stone to Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda, and finds that the two books sharply contrast. He finds that Kadare’s ghosts, fables, magic, etc. are “rendered, through a child’s eyes, intimate and familiar"; whereas, he sees Saramago’s “exotica” (e.g., ceremonies, pageants, and processions) as having a “stiff, brocaded quality” and an “embellished opacity” that translates into “novelistic inertness, a frozen tableau.”
Saramago’s writing style is a subject about which Wood and Updike hold deeply divergent views. For example, Wood likes Saramago’s run-on style. He has called Saramago’s labyrinthine sentences “extraordinary” (see Wood’s great “Death Takes A Holiday,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2008). However, what Wood deems extraordinary, Updike considers merely “gabby” (see Updike’s equally great “Two's a Crowd,” The New Yorker, September 27, 2004; collected in Updike’s 2007 Due Considerations). I find their conflicting viewpoints regarding Saramago fascinating. It goes to a fundamental psychoanalytical difference between them: Updike is a narrator; Wood distrusts narration. His preferred form, his “ideal sentence” (see Wood’s “The Fun Stuff,” The New Yorker, November 29, 2010) resembles free-association. Someday, I’d like to explore this subject further.
For now, I’ll conclude simply by noting that Wood’s “Chronicles and Fragments” and Updike’s “Chronicles and Processions” are both excellent. Comparing them, I think Updike is better at conveying the texture of Kadare’s prose; Wood is better at elucidating Kadare’s meaning.
Credit: The above portrait of Ismail Kadare is by Riccardo Vecchio; it appears in this week's New Yorker as an illustration for James Wood's "Chronicles and Fragments."
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