Ismail Kadare: Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

A New York Times Notable Book

A Los Angeles Times Notable Book

“Spring Flowers, Spring Frost is murky and capricious at times, yet with flashes of compelling wit and the frenetic syncopation of life about to be sucked back down a black hole…. Kadare is closer here to Swift than to Kafka; he cuts sharp and all ways.”

— Richard Eder, New York Times Book Review

“Fans of the fantastical, veterans of Borges and Kafka, may recognize the familiar combination of the mundane and the extraordinary…. With a breezy fluency, [Kadare] solves his mysteries with a political and mythical flair.”

— Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Throughout the book, images of icebergs, the Titanic, and enchanted snakes recur, all of which may represent Albania and its various misguided governors. The result is like a dream— seemingly full of stirring meanings whose interpretations remain tantalizingly out of reach.”

— The New Yorker

“[Kadare’s] mixture of the realistic and the allegorical, the crush- ingly mundane and the eerily fantastic, is probably the best way to capture the inherent contradictions of present-day Albania…. The result is a heady brew of local traditions and universal themes.”

— Washington Post Book World

“Impish, blackly comic … Underneath all this literary playfulness … lurks genuine insight into the duality of human nature and the often two-faced relations between men and women.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“Mind-bending … Compelling … One often has the sense of having wandered into alien terrain, a Balkan universe with undertones of Borges and Kafka…. Be prepared to have your sense of reality nudged a little out of kilter.”

— Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

“A great pleasure to read. As an exercise in what writers from the formerly communist countries are now attempting, it is exem- plary. As another strange and seductive work from Albania, a mysterious country for most of us, it is both instructive and hauntingly familiar.”

— Washington Times

“A rich, symbolic questioning of humanity’s capacity for creating a murderless society … The predicament of human com- munity, which may be human nature, is enough to send any man cowering back to the womb. Philosophical fiction of great poetry and power.”

— Booklist, starred review

“Kadare artfully portrays how an individual is affected when his society is suddenly released from long oppression. Highly recommended.”

— Library Journal, starred review

“A folktale of enchantment and transformation … as spare and haunting as anything Kadare has ever written.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“The juxtaposition of ideas and bizarre images is alternately beautiful, peculiar, and provocative, as Kadare once again pro- vides an excellent glimpse at the difficult nature of life in a politically unstable land.”

— Publishers Weekly

“In Ismail Kadare’s latest novel, Albania awakes from the isolation and terror it experienced under communist dictatorship…. Between the chapters that tell this story is a series of ‘counter-chapters’ in which the writing breaks free from the restraints of naturalism and where Kadare shows his virtuosity as novelist and poet…. Each is handled with masterful skill.”

— Review of Contemporary Fiction

AS HE WAS CROSSING THE INTERSECTION, Mark Gurabardhi noticed a crowd of people, which was growing by the minute, gathering on the right-hand side of the street. Most likely he would have walked past without a second glance if he hadn’t heard someone say the word snake! — spoken not in fright but in astonishment.

A snake at this time of year? Now that was out of the ordinary…. Mark went over to the knot of bystanders to see what was going on. Most of the people standing around were passersby, looking on just as he was. “Holy smoke, it really is a snake!” someone said, as they all shuffled around to let newcomers get a look. “But how can you tell if it’s dead or alive?” One glance was enough to tell Mark that it was neither dead nor alive, but just hibernating, like a normal reptile.

Two youngsters (something about them made it clear that, without specifying how, they were the ones who had unearthed the snake) flashed their eyes in pride at the crowd. To demonstrate their rights of ownership, they poked the creature this way and that with a stick. When they lifted the reptile off the ground, people shrank back, but each time they did, someone in the crowd piped up with a “Don’t worry, frozen snakes don’t bite, and even if you do get bitten, it’s not dangerous, the venom’s too weak, like it’s diluted by the cold….”

A man in a felt hat seemed to be looking for a target for all his pent-up anger. “We’ve come to a pretty pass,” he seemed to be saying. “Where but in Albania do you get minds as warped as that? No, we don’t get up in the morning to do something useful, we get up with some crazy idea in our heads — unearthing sleeping snakes! What’ve you got between your ears, you little perverts? You wouldn’t lift a finger to help save those antique vases or ancient bronzes people are forever digging up all over the place these days — oh, no, you wouldn’t, but you don’t miss a beat when it comes to finding horrors like this!”

Two others were discussing what to do with the snake. You could bury it again where it had been found and let it wait for warmer weather, as nature intended; or you could put it by a fireside — you’d have to be very careful, all the same — and let it thaw out.

“Have you all lost your minds?” another bystander blurted out. “All winter long we’ve all been frozen to the bone. Nobody cared a fig about us when we were cold — and now we’re supposed to worry about some lizard?” Then an old woman chimed in. “Everything’s gone to wrack and ruin, mark my words. I’ve been around for many a long year, God knows, but I’ve never seen anyone try to stop a snake from hibernating in peace!”

Mark turned around and was about to move on. His old friend Zef, if he’d been there, would surely have seen a symbolic link between this frozen reptile and the present state of affairs. Only two weeks ago, when they’d been chatting about the way things had gone in their bizarre world these past few years, Zef had likened the monstrosities of today’s Albania to the ancient tale of the girl who had married a snake. And he’d added, with dark foreboding: All these faces that change their masks from one day to the next, like in some Greek drama… they don’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Mark felt a pang of guilt for not having asked about his friend, whom he’d not seen since then at the office or in the café.

He looked up as a police car went by. The spirals of black dirt that it raised in its wake seemed angry at being dragged out of their slumber, but then slowly settled down before returning to rest on the somnolent highway.

Though the patrol car had been moving briskly along, Mark managed to get a good look at the policeman’s face. Sitting in the front passenger seat, the officer had even seemed to turn slightly so as to look in Mark’s direction.