Spring Flowers, Spring Frost

A Novel

By: Ismail Kadare

Narrated by: Gregory Abbey

In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: A bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events - such as the marriage of a girl and a snake - confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may have committed. Some even claim the ghosts of former dictators Hoxha, Brezhnev, and Ulbricht - not to mention Oedipus - have been seen there.... Against this backdrop, a simple and sensual love story between a painter and a girl stands out as light against dark.

©2000, 2011 Librairie Artheme Fayard. English translation copyright 2002, 2011 by David Bellos (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

narration could use a redo

definitely the most controversial ismail kadar novel and probably is the most lacking in its translation. the story was interesting but there were some elements that weren't clear to me. kinda reminds me of the sympathizer and those books in that trilogy. narration is really lacking though, really bad pronunciation of words and tones.

For the motivated

This isn't really something I think will be appreciated by a reader who isn't motivated by reasons besides looking for a good read. I like the fairy tale story of the woman who marries a snake, but a lot of the surrounding narrative is confusing and less compelling. But if you're looking for novels by Albanian authors translated into English you don't have a lot of options.

WTF

Just finished 'Spring Flowers, Spring Frost'. It is rare that I read a book and find it as completely incomprehesible as this story, if it is a story. I have a feeling a lot was lost in translation, literally. This was an English translation of a French translation of an Albanian novel. I have to assume that there were cultural references that were not accessible to the French translator or so subtly crafted as to be inaccessible to the English translator. The story, such that it is, revolves around a painter who is employed by the arts counsil of some small provincial town. He has a sexual relationship with his model, who he describes as his girlfriend, but who he does little with other than paint her and have sex. Their relationship has no literary arch at all. Mixed in with these brief encounters is the consideration of a myth of a woman who married a snake, a robbery at the national bank, a description of an Albanian cultural tradition of blood feuds, a personification of the iceberg that sunk the Titantic and the Greek myth of the theft of immortality. Other than the occasional comparison of the hidden entrance to mythic vaults, or to the hidden mass of an iceberg to the sex of a woman, there is little to tie any of this together. In frustration I looked for some literary analysis online to find that these side stories are meant to comment on the fall of communism in Albania and the resultant resurrection of long suppressed superstitions. My guess is that either I just completely missed this, or I was not sufficiently high on the proper drugs to see the point. To state the obvious, I wouldn't recommend this book and am not sure what made it appear on a list of recommended books.