Synopsis
Seeing pyramids as Egypt's macabre obsession with death, Pharoah Cheops resists having his own built, and with his court sages, he discovers that the pyramid was originally constructed as a means of oppressing the people.
Reviews
Albanian novelist Kadare (The Concert), living in political exile in France since 1991, spins cogent tales about the temptations and evils of totalitarian bureaucracy. His latest carries a universal message. Set in ancient Egypt-where Pharaoh Cheops oversees the construction of his tomb, the highest, most majestic pyramid ever, to be built by tens of thousands of his brainwashed subjects-the novel's hypnotically Kafkaesque narrative exposes the alienating, destructive effects of investing unquestioned power in a ruler, a state or a religion. The massive pyramid devours Egypt's resources and energies. Thousands die as it rises ever higher, and Cheops, depicted as a power-mad lunatic who craves adulation, periodically unleashes waves of arrests and torture of those falsely accused of sabotaging the project. Analogies to Stalin's paranoia, bloody purges and other terrors spring to mind, but the story takes on a broader meaning, demonstrating how a state or a ruling elite can mold public opinion so that its citizens willingly act against their own best interests. As the narrative closes, it leaps ahead centuries to display Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) erecting in central Asia a pyramid made of 70,000 skulls. Through this closing image, and the horrors that precede it, Kadare again proves himself a master of the political parable.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The seventh novel to have appeared in English from the Albanian author (of, most notably, Chronicle in Stone, 1987, and The Concert, 1994) who is frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. This is a parable, set in Egypt in the twenty-sixth century B.C. and after, about the building of the pyramids as a tactic employed by the state to involve its populace in a vast ongoing (and ``useless'') project designed to instill fear and suppress dissent. Kadare develops his core idea with dry funereal wit and trains a sardonic eye on the novel's only real character, the surly, megalomaniac young pharaoh Cheops. But the book devolves into disconnected (though chronological) mockery of the illogic and paranoia exhibited by ancient Egyptian--and, by extension, contemporary European--tyrannical regimes, and is further scuttled by a lumpy translation (at a second remove from the original) blemished by slangy anachronisms. A below-par performance by a world-class writer. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Cheops declares that he does not want a pyramid built to house him after death, but when the terrified priests argue that building the pyramids is an important task that has always kept the populace occupied and hence compliant, he relents. Soon the construction of the grandest pyramid of them all obssesses the people, who are at first elated but soon crushed by the reign of terror that results, as suspected saboteurs are tortured and men die daily while putting in place the huge stones. In a refreshingly clear, bold style, Kadare (The Concert, LJ 10/1/94) ably depicts the misuse of power and the hollow results for all involved. An effective political fable from one of Albania's few novelists, now living in France; for most collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Kadare imagines that Cheops, the twenty-sixth-century B.C. pharaoh responsible for the largest of Egypt's pyramids, at first contemplates not building the great structure. Dismayed, his ministers set out to convince him of the necessity of pyramids. They explain that pyramids really have "no connection with tombs or death" but are devices for social control; the enormous expense of materials, time, and labor involved in making pyramids keeps the people from the temptations of prosperity--worst among them, resistance to authority. Cheops capitulates to his ministers' argument, and the rest of Kadare's reconception of ancient history portrays pharaonic Egypt as a brutal totalitarianism highly suggestive of Kadare's homeland, Albania, under its late Communist regime. Shot through with elegantly minimalist wry humor and utterly excluding any hope for even benevolent tyranny, let alone democracy, this is a reverse dystopia; that is, it is a vision of a past rather than, as in such prime dystopias as Orwell's 1984 and Zamyatin's We, a future whose ostensible glories are totally compromised by political repression. Ray Olson
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