The file on H.
By: Ismail Kadare ; translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos.
Contributors: Bray, Barbara.
Edition: 1st North American ed.
Publisher: Arcade Pub.; Distributed by Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
Description: In the mid 1930s, two young Irish-American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder, in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey without ever writing them down. The answer, they think, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic.

But immediately on their arrival the scholars' seemingly arcane research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under the surveillance of a nearsighted informer with a prodigious gift for reproducing conversations he has overheard. He is soon generating a stream of floridly written reports about the visitors' puzzling activities.

News of their presence in the provincial town of N-- sets gossip to flying, and while the town's governor speculates on their imminent capture, his pretty wife, from her bath, plots her delivery from a marital ennui worthy of Madame Bovary. Research and intrigue proceed apace, but it isn't until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.
Notes: "First published in Albanian under the title Dosja H. (1981); translated from the revised version of the French text in Ismail Kadare, Oeuvres, tome IV, Fayard, 1996"--T.p. verso.