The Successor

The Successor is a 2003 novel by the Albanian writer and inaugural International Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare. It is the second part of a diptych of which the first part is the novella Agamemnon's Daughter. The diptych is ranked by many critics among the author's greatest works. Background Agamemnon's Daughter, the prequel to The Successor, was written in 1985 and smuggled out of Albania before the collapse of the Hoxhaist regime, but it was published almost two decades later, after Kadare had already composed The Successor as its companion-piece. As opposed to the more personal Agamemnon's Daughter, The Successor is much more grounded in actual history, presenting a fictional account of the events that may have led to the still-unexplained 1981 death of Mehmet Shehu, Albania's long-time Prime Minister during the Cold War and Enver Hoxha's most trusted ally and designated number two ever since the death of Stalin and the subsequent Soviet–Albanian split. Official Albanian government sources called his death a suicide, but his denouncement as "multiple foreign agent" and "traitor to the motherland" and the ensuing prosecution of the entire Shehu clan (starting with his influential wife, Fiqrete Shehu and his son, Albanian writer Bashkim Shehu) has led to persistent popular rumors that Shehu had in fact been murdered on orders coming directly from either Enver Hoxha or his wife Nexhmije. Plot The novel is divided into seven chapters, the first four of which ("A Death in December", "The Autopsy", "Fond Memories", and "The Fall") are narrated by an omniscient narrator, and the fifth ("The Guide") by a third person limited narrator (the dictator of the country, a thinly veiled portrait of Enver Hoxha). As the mystery behind the death – announced, in a characteristically simple Kadareian manner, in the novel's opening sentence ("The Designated Successor was found dead in his bedroom at dawn on December 14") – ostensibly closes to an inevitable resolution, the narration abruptly turns to first-person point of view, as each of the last two chapters is narrated by one of the novel's two most important characters: "The Architect" (who renovated the Successor's palace and was one of only few people who knew about its secret underground passage leading directly from the Guide's to the Successor's home), and in the "extraordinary [last] chapter", "The Successor", the already deceased title character.