The Palace of Dreams: A Novel

by Ismail Kadare

Overview

The mysterious palace of dreams stands at the heart of a vast empire. Inside, workers sift, sort, and interpret the dreams the empire’s citizens. They search out Master-Dreams that will provide clues to the destiny of the empire and its Sultan.
Mark-Alem, scion of a noble family that has provided viziers to the Sultan from time immemorial, and whose power the Sultan distrusts, is recruited into the palace of Creams at the humblest level. He immediately feels the terrible pressure that drives his coworkers, the dread of overlooking a crucial dream whose capture and interpretation might avert political disaster.
But he rapidly rises through the hierarchy—only barely finding his bearings in one section of the Palace’s labyrinthine passages that represent the entire empire’s consciousness laid bare before he is promoted to another. And the pressure only increases as he becomes familiar with the fates of subversive dreamers and personally responsible for the sort of dreams that might ruin an entire family. A family like his own.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628723236
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	04/15/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	557,560
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ismail Kadare is the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, and is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He is acclaimed worldwide as one of the most important writers of our time. Translations of his novels have been published in more than forty countries. He divides his time between Paris, France, and Tirana, Albania.

Editorial Reviews

"Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper." —Jean-Christophe Castelli, Vanity Fair

"As an allegory of power, The Palace of Dreams is flawless. . . . In its terse geometry, Kadare has introduced a historical and intensely human sadness." —Los Angeles Times

"Kadare's most daring novel, one of the most complete visions of totalitarianism ever committed to paper." —Jean-Christophe Castelli, Vanity Fair

"As an allegory of power, The Palace of Dreams is flawless. . . . In its terse geometry, Kadare has introduced a historical and intensely human sadness." —Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

This is a strange book, difficult to characterize. . . . Mr. Kadare's evident knack is to be mordant, witty, amusing with his passing jokes and graceful sentences. He demonstrates a talent for invoking the extraordinary significance of a commonplace moment, which is no mean accomplishment. . . . Not much happens in the novel, and its series of small, self-conscious and even self-congratulatory moves can get to be, even in a relatively short book, a bit tiresome.

David R. Slavitt

First published in 1981 in Albania, where it was immediately banned, this hallucinatory novel unfolds as an extended parable about an all-controlling dictatorship that monitors even the subconscious lives of its citizens. The setting is 19th-century Albania, a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, which in Albanian novelist/poet Kadare's tense allegory represents the modern totalitarian police state. Mark-Alem works in the bureau of sleep and dreams, which collects, sorts and analyzes tens of thousands of dreams duly reported by an abject, compliant populace to a state that avers that ``the interpretation of a dream, fallen like a stray spark into the brain of one out of millions of sleepers, may help to save the country or its Sovereign from disaster . . . '' Assisted by his powerful uncle, the Vizier, Mark-Alem enjoys a meteoric rise in the dream-interpreting bureaucracy, but his failure to decipher one politically significant dream gives the state an opportunity to lash out against his aristocratic, patriotic family, leaving behind a pile of corpses. The author of four previous novels published to acclaim in Europe, Kadare found asylum in Paris two years before Albania elected its first noncommunist government. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The Palace of Dreams is the most powerful bureaucracy in the Ottoman Empire, for here ``all the dreams of all citizens without exception'' are interpreted, classified, and stored. Once a week a Master Dream is chosen to reveal ``the true state of the Empire.'' Into this infinitely treacherous labyrinth steps Mark-Alem, whose naivete brings injury to his ancient Albanian family and--paradoxically--propels him to the pinnacle of power. Kadare is Albania's best-known writer, and his new novel shapes an elegant metaphor for that country's late dictatorship, which he fled in 1990. Recommended for most collections of literary fiction.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.

Library Journal