Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare

Find it at Amazon https://amzn.to/3WQyRCV

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.