Original review of Agamemnon's daughter

Feature Writing
A man’s greatest downfall
By: Katrina C. Guevarra

“We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?”
--Joseph Stalin

Up until 1992, Stalin Communism was the way of life in Albania. There were rules and customs for everything. Everyone was to abide to every order of the state, every custom, every tradition– even if it meant being inhumane. It was a period where there was no room for one’s own opinion, own emotions and own preferences. Everyone was expected to make sacrifices when the circumstance asks for it, when the tradition asks for it –and above all because Stalin said so.

Agamemnon’s daughter is one of the more popular novels of the very first Man Booker International Prize winner, Ismail Kadare. The book contained three spellbinding collections of novellas. Its title story, Agamemnon’s daughter is a story of an unnamed journalist, who was taken away the love of his life at the height of his career. His lady love, Suzana, was told by her own father to break off the relationship with the journalist because he is engaged to someone else and rumors about their relationship might ruin the journalist’s career.

However, Suzana could have chosen a better timing than she did because she broke off her relationship with the journalist right before the biggest day of his career – his very first invitation to be with the high ranks of the Albania government at the grandstand for a very significant and high-brow event in Albania, the May 1st assembly.

The journalist compares Suzana’s sacrifice with that of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, sacrifice during the Trojan war. As he go through checkpoints after checkpoints and walk closer to the grandstand, his memory wandered on the things he gave up to be able to have that privilege – the people he stepped on, the humanity that was lost. Then he started to doubt Suzana. After relating his present situation with the events of the Trojan war, he then came to a conclusion that Iphigenia was Agamemnon’s greatest downfall. And that he wouldn’t let Suzana be his Iphigenia. In the books, the Trojan war has ended. In the narrator’s mind, it has only just begun.

Also included in the novel are two other mini-novellas, “The Blinding Order” which tells of an old tradition of blinding people who they suspect to have an evil eye in any way (even just through the lightness or darkness of their irises and how many evil things they have witnessed). Another is “The Great Wall”, an exchange of philosophic views between a guardian of the Great Wall and one who was called to repair it.

Kadare’s work exposes readers to various social, political, philosophical issues inside a communist state. It also exposes the different desires men have, especially when it comes to power and love. To be able to get his work published, he had to smuggle manuscripts of his works from Albania to France in order to have his manuscripts published. He went through an ordeal of only bringing two to three pages of his work everytime and disguising it as a foreign material so he would not be accused of Exfiltration which is forbidden in Albanian Law.