2026/038: Broken April — Ismail Kadare (translator: John Hodgson)

The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. [Chapter 3]

A tragedy set in Albania. Gjorg Berisha is compelled by the Kanun, the ancient laws of the mountain country, to kill the man who killed his brother. The murder cements his own fate: he'll be killed in turn by one of the men of the Kryeqyqe family, in thirty days' time. (Women are generally excluded from the messy cycle of vengeance.) The feud which Gjorg is part of has been running for seventy years, since a guest -- sacrosant according to the Kanun -- was murdered. Since that murder, hundreds more men have been killed. It's unclear whether there's even a possibility of the feud ending before every adult male in both families has paid the blood-debt.

There's a dark, timeless air to the first chapter, so much so that I was shocked when Gjorg paused to watch an aeroplane fly over! Soon, though, the focus switches to more modern-minded characters: the writer Bessian Vorpsi and his bride Diana, spending their honeymoon in the mountains. Bessian spends hours explaining the Kanun and the blood feud ('at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things') to Diana, who is horrified. She glimpses Gjorg, on his way to pay the blood-tax, and becomes fascinated by him and his fate. Gjorg, too, is enchanted by this beautiful 'foreign' woman from the lowlands, and spends much of his remaining life-span searching the country for another glimpse of her. And Diana breaks custom and does an unspeakable thing in search of Gjorg.

Kadare recounts the story simply and powerfully, without any authorial discussion of the morality of the characters' actions. Bessian and Diana provide a twentieth-century perspective, but Bessian's at pains to insist that this is a legal code that probably predates Christianity. And he does provide an overview of the Kanun's political, agricultural, social and cultural effects. The long history and the persistence of the Kanun is fascinating -- though I was perturbed to learn that blood feuds have become common again since the end of communism. (An Albanian Boy's Life Ruined by Blood Feuds [2014].)

This was a compelling read, though not a cheerful one. I pitied Gjorg but did not especially warm to him. And the sense of each individual's helplessness in the face of tradition, Kanun and honour was deeply depressing.

Each man chose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn... [chapter 4]