SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Could the bottle of Lafite, with the initials of Thomas Jefferson and dated 1787, then sitting on a pedestal at Christie’s auction house, possibly have been part of a newly discovered Nazi hoard? On December 5, 1987, Michael Broadbent, the head of the wine department of Christie’s, readied himself to auction off this bottle, the oldest authenticated bottle of red wine ever to come up for auction at Christie’s. He knew its provenance was crucial, as it would certainly become the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold. A section of the Old Marais district in Paris had recently been torn down, and some wondered if it could have been found walled up in some basement to avoid theft. Others suggested that it had a Nazi history. Then again, Thomas Jefferson had sent hundreds of cases of wine home to Monticello (and some to George Washington) when he left his job as Minister to France to become the Secretary of State, and one of these cases may have been lost or stolen. Auction excitement was high, and rumors were rife because of the age and importance of this bottle, not just for its qualities as wine but also because it was an important historical artifact. The story of this bottle expands into an examination of the elite wine market from 1987 – the present. Exciting non-fiction.

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Writing of Albanian life in Gjirokaster, the city of his birth, during World War II and its aftermath, Ismail Kadare creates a deceptive novel which looks, at first, as if it is going to be a simple morality tale. “Deceptive” is the operating word here, however. There is nothing simple about this novel at all, perhaps because Kadare, constantly under the gaze of Albania’s communist officials in his early years, always had to invent new ways to disguise what he really wanted to say without being censored. As a result, he began writing in a style akin to post-modernism, creating a literary soup which mixed fact and fiction, past and present, reality and dream, truth and myth, and life and death. By mixing up time periods, bringing ghosts to life, repeating symbols and images, and leaving open questions about the action of a novel, he was able to disguise the harsh truths of everyday life and the horrors of past history. That style continues in this novel from 2008 (newly translated by John Hodgson), despite the fact that Kadare was granted political asylum in France in 1990. Those who like their novels “neat” and unambiguous may find Kadare’s style especially difficult.

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