The Pyramid

A satire on Stalinist Albania under the rule of Enver Hoxha, a novel about the construction of a pyramid whose only purpose is to keep the population enslaved, enabling tyranny to flourish. Translated from the French by David Bellos. From the author of BROKEN APRIL, THE PALACE OF DREAMS and THE CONCERT.

From the Albanian writer who has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize comes a hypnotic narrative of ancient Egypt, a work that is at once a historical novel and an exploration of the horror of untrammeled state power. It is 2600 BC. The Pharaoh Cheops is inclined to forgo the construction of a pyramid in his honor, but his court sages hasten to persuade him otherwise. The pyramid, they tell him, is not a tomb but a paradox: it keeps the Egyptian people content by oppressing them utterly. The pyramid is the pillar that holds power aloft. If it wavers, everything collapses.

And so the greatest pyramid ever begins to rise. It is a monument that crushes dozens of men with the placing of each of its tens of thousands of stones. It is the subject of real and imaginary conspiracies that necessitate ruthless purges and fantastic tortures. It is a monster that will consume all Egypt before it swallows the body of Cheops himself. As told by Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid is a tour de force of Kafkaesque paranoia and Orwellian political prophecy.

"A haunting meditation on the matter-of-fact brutality of political despotism." - The New York Times Book Review
"Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language." - Wall Street Journal