UNFATHOMABLE AS THE DOLL

A memoir by celebrated Albanian writer Ismail Kadare feels as inaccessible to me as the subject of the memoir is to its author.

The Doll by Ismail Kadare originally published in 2015. Translated by John Hodgson from the Albanian and published by Counterpoint Press in 2020.

Between a disappointing election week and my travel to Texas, I didn’t finish reading my week’s assignment—The Doll by Ismail Kadare—in time for publication on Sunday morning. Hence, this arrives more than a day late into your inbox and my recommendation of this work is likely as anemic as my own experience of reading it.

I will begin with a sheepish admission, that I’m yet to read even one of Kadare’s prizewinning novels. Given that he is prolific (he’s a fiction writer, poet, essayist and playwright), I have no doubt I’ll get to it soon enough. I would like to preface my own reading of The Doll by stating how celebrated this author is in Albania and around the world. For its inaugural prize in 2005, the Mann Booker International Prize Committee chose Kadare for his entire body of work. This Albanian writer has also been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature fifteen times in all, and he has been awarded many other prestigious ones over the years: the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; the Herder Prize; the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts; the Jerusalem Prize; the Park Kyong-ni Prize and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He has been compared to the world’s most luminous writers and thinkers: Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Milan Kundera, and Balzac, among others, and he has been read in over 45 languages. That said, this illustrious Albanian award-winning writer did not manage to win me over even with a subject so close to most of our hearts, that of a mother’s love and grace.

Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, The Doll opens with a mesmerizing passage about the impending death of Kadare’s mother—”Incredible, how light she was! As if made of paper.”—in Paris in April 1994. The author then launches into the idea of mothers and the perceptions of mothers.

It reminded me of how I felt about my own mother when I was in elementary and middle school. She could not speak English (like several other mothers in India’s Chennai in the mid to late sixties) and that made me feel both a sense of shame and insecurity about others’ perception of me because my mother was not “educated” in the way that people were at the time. This feeling of uncertainty and insecurity is described by Ismail Kadare with respect to something more poignant, the fact of not even having a mother.

Around the neighborhood and later at school, we learned all the poems about mothers. There were also poems, and even a song, about children who didn’t have mothers, with heart-rending repetitions of the phrase ‘without a mother’. I didn’t know of any classmates who didn’t have a mother. Perhaps there were some, but they didn’t mention it. According to one school friend, not having a mother was shameful. Two of our girl friends, Ylberja and Ela Laboviti, laughed at both of them, and said they were mixing up the words ‘shame’ and ‘pity’ and didn’t know what they were talking about.

Such passages make the early part of The Doll immensely readable. What The Doll conveys in all its infinite wisdom is how mothers are never totally fathomable. They’re a ragbag of emotions, and, as a result, they’re invariably founts of light as well as galaxies of darkness.

The scenery on a drive from Rila monastery to Plovdiv in Bulgaria. I wonder how different the landscape is in Albania which is not more than 300 miles away from Bulgaria.

Mothers are the hardest creatures to understand, Andrei Voznesensky said to me at Alain Bosquet’s in Paris, during a dinner which Helena and I had been invited to. I had asked the Russian poet, among other things, about a famous poem of his, written partly as an anagram. It included a line in which the Russian for ‘mother’—mat—was repeated three times, matmatmat, but left unfinished on the fourth repetition—ma—which at the end, associated with the t of the third mat (‘mother’), made the word tma, meaning darkness.

Some of the most entertaining chapters in the memoir relate to the value system in Albania in the middle of the twentieth century. Kadare’s mother who was otherwise hard to pin down made it pretty clear, right at the start, that she did not like her husband’s home—or his mother.

The first chilliness between the young bride and her mother-in-law was probably caused by the bride’s lack of interest in the house, or rather her failure to be awed by it. But the true cause lay deeper, making their coldness unavoidable.

It was well known that when the families of Gjirokastra formed marriage alliances, they immediately redefined their relationships to each other. Besides the usual forging of a bond between two clans, there was an extraordinary kind of deafening din in the period before the wedding. This was an opportunity for the old houses to behave with their well-known swank, pride, swagger and vanity, so that the two families being joined in marriage could be set on the scales and compared.

We begin to understand how the vivacity and spirit of a woman can be squeezed out of her by a system that mostly favors men. First a woman is subject to the patriarchal values of her father and her brothers; later, when she acquires a husband, her life and her world view is shaped by that of her husband and, almost always, by the machinations of her mother-in-law and often other women. What is particularly interesting is how women turn around to oppress women inside the very system that subjected them to emotional agony.

When it then becomes her turn to be the mother-in-law, it’s clear that ‘The Doll’ isn’t very pleasant, at least at the outset, to the woman her son favors. We do not also get to know if the relationship between Kadare’s mother and his wife, Helena, is frosty or warm. So much of this is left unsaid that I reached the end of the book not having truly understood the point of this memoir.

When I turned to the last page of The Doll, I was reminded of yet another book I read many moons ago. The fictional work conceived originally in Hindi—Mai Silently Mother by Geetanjali Shree—masterfully exposes, in its beautiful and ugly facets, this conundrum that we call a mother.

While The Doll kept me engaged, I didn’t feel that Kadare gave me enough evidence of what exactly made his mother both fragile and inscrutable in his eyes. Something was missing from the picture he painted and while he alluded to her darkness by describing the unknown dungeon or “prison” in the ancestral Kadare home both at the beginning and the end of his memoir, I felt that he didn’t present ‘The Doll’ clearly enough on the page in an attempt to fill in the void for me, the reader. Perhaps that was exactly his intent, his artistic effort being, simply, to limn the nature of his mother and not color in the unknowable core of her being.

We can stare at each other all day and still know nothing about the other. Two makonde carvings in my home that are so wooden they won’t utter a word to each other. Carvings from Tanzania, circa 1975.