The Palace of Dreams

"The Palace of Dreams" is a fascinating novel and one of those that begs for discussion. Kadare creates a story immersed in an ominous but unidentified threat. Along the way, the author asks the reader to ponder many themes: fate, the nature of reality, national identity, and, of course, dreams. A seemingly simple tale engenders almost endless possibilities. The reader is unlikely to view dreams in the same way again. A simple but incredibly creative idea for a novel. An easy and very rewarding read from a gifted author.

Kadare's metaphor for a monolithic police state and its workings. Set in the late 19th century Ottoman Empire--I figured this out from several subtle hints in the novel--along with elements from the late 20th century, this novel tells of a young man, Mark Alem, who is employed by the Palace of Dreams, the author's surreal intelligence agency, where dreams from all over the empire are collected, sorted, interpreted, with an eye to discovering which might be a "Master-Dream" pointing to a possible coup or other upheaval in the State. When one is discovered, the sultan's secret police can nip a possible plot in the bud and do away with any perpetrators. Mark Alem starts out in the Selection Department and passes along a file containing what he feels might be a possibly incriminating dream: a wasteland filled with garbage, a musical instrument, a rampaging bull, and a bridge. When he is promoted to the Interpretation Section, he is faced with the very same dream. We don't know his final interpretation, but agents from the Master Dream Section become very busy....

A chilling and nightmarish novel, reminiscent of Kafka--the claustrophobic, labyrinthine corridors of the Palace are evoked frighteningly. Mark-Alem must find his way from one department to another alone, hoping for help. On his day off, he notices how pale and insipid the real world has become as compared with the inner lives of people in the Palace. Atmospheric.

Very highly recommended. I'd advise reading the show more author's Three-Arched Bridge first if possible to get some backstory. show less

I was browsing the library shelves when I came across this book. It was clear from the blurb that I had to read it - an allegory for Soviet totalitarianism that centres around dreams! Just my sort of thing. Indeed, it is a beautiful and subtle form of dystopia. I read the whole short novel in a single sitting and was very impressed by it. The atmosphere reminded me somewhat of [b:The Unconsoled|40117|The Unconsoled|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1342193138s/40117.jpg|6372970], especially when the protagonist Mark-Alem was lost in corridors.

The novel is set in a monolithic latter-day Ottoman empire that has a complex bureaucracy for monitoring and analysing the population’s dreams. The empire’s rulers believe, or wish to be seen to believe, that from dreams future events can be discerned. Mark-Alem, scion of an old family whose political power has waxed and waned, starts a job at the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams. Mark-Alem provides a striking point of view, as he is collaborating in a gigantic system of surveillance and control that he fears and cannot understand. Yet he is within it and this gives him power. The novel does not condemn him, rather it invites the reader to sympathise with his actions despite him being complicit in a terrible system. This ambivalence is beautifully evoked.

Although the use of dreams in the novel could have been intended to be purely allegorical, I very much enjoyed it on a literal level. Dreams have always been a show more fascination of mine. I liked the depiction of Mark-Alem’s absorption into dreams, such that when he takes a day off he is struck by how pallid and uninteresting the waking world is.

This part from page 127 was especially appealing:

’”Do you see what I mean? No history book, no encyclopedia, not all the holy tomes or suchlike put together, nor any school or university or library could supply the truth about the world in so concise and complete a form as these archives.”

“But isn’t that truth rather distorted?” Mark-Alem ventured to ask.

The archivist’s smile looked even more ironic in profile than it would have done seen full-face.

“Who can say it’s not what we see with our eyes open that is distorted, and that what’s described here isn’t the true essence of things?”

A library of dreams stretching back centuries, classified into categories as you would books! What a gorgeous and alarming thought, as well as a neat analogy for the files of the NKVD et al. show less

This police-state parable, set in a reimagined Ottoman empire, is bloodless enough that the Hoxha regime almost overlooked it, belatedly dropping the banhammer with 20,000 copies already in the wild. The titular institution is a version of Kafka's Castle (though less fiendish and less funny), a bureaucratic maze dedicted to sifting the nocturnal reveries of the Empire for subversive symbols. There's one dramatic incident late on, but otherwise we follow our nonentity of a protagonist as he blithely navigates the Party apparatus, inadvertently getting his illustrious family into a spot of bother. The plot touches briefly on the tradition of the Balkan rhapsodes and there's some Slav/Turk/Albanian ethnic tension which is interesting, but this novel is slight and bland in comparison to other suppressed Iron Curtain satires like Kundera's The Joke or Jiří Gruša's The Questionnaire.

Mark-Alem is a member of the most prominent family, the Quiprilis, in a Balkan empire ruled by a Sultan, a family that can trace it roots back centuries and which has always been at the centre of political, military, diplomatic, economic power. So it is no surprise that Mark-Alem gets a job in the Palace of Dreams, a vast bureaucratic empire charged with gathering, sifting, sorting, classifying and ultimately interpreting the thousand of dreams that citizens provide every day to officials across the empire. These can portend great or dangerous things and are considered more important to the Sultan than all his military or diplomatic resources. Mark-Alem starts in the lowly Selection but rising quickly to the more prestigious Interpretation and then the heights of Director for the Master-Dream section responsible for selecting one dream per week that will be of particular significance for the Sultan, and then Mark-Alem becomes assistant to the Director-General and de facto head of the whole Palace just when he thinks his world is falling apart because a violent power struggle between the Quiprilis and the Sultan with people murdered, executed, and arrested by the score---the impetus for which was a dream that was interpreted as the Quiprilis planning a coup, a dream that Mark-Alem himself saw in his first days but did not “interpret” correctly.

The book appeared in 1981 and was immediately banned by authorities in Albania. It is not hard to see why. It is a brilliant show more parody of the madness of the Soviet-style system….the endless efforts of control, in this case control of the future through the interpretation of dreams….the interpretation of dreams as an example of one of the most terrifying aspects of totalitarian rule: the intrusion of the state into every nook and cranny of private life until there is no such thing as a private sphere….the complete arbitrariness of the system whereby from one day to the next, someone seemingly in good stead is denounced, arrested, killed and then all family members and friends tremble for their own safety…the limitless prospects for paranoia, evidenced in the book with a dream from a grocery owner in a remote part of the empire that makes its way into the system and once “interpreted”, sets in motion a cataclysm of events…the carving out of a “reality” that bears no resemblance to any reality that sane people would ascribe to and yet which creates its own reality and determines life and death for millions….the sheer madness of a system where no one is safe because all structures of history, normal expectations, rational behavior have no weight, no influence, no predictive guidelines.

Kadare has a number of strong symbols and metaphors in the book. One is the Palace itself, a suffocating atmosphere in a vast labyrinth of interconnecting halls and passageways with no signposts for directions where one could wander for hours or days with no rescue….a pretty good representation of life under a Soviet-style regime. Or the men blinded by the state because they were thought to have the “evil eye” , a horror which could be the result of an anonymous denunciation…hence the precariousness and arbitrariness of life. Or the fact that Mark-Alem who would have once been repulsed by this, now is indifferent to it because of his experience in the Palace where “hell and heaven are indistinguishable”. Or Mark-Alem finding that he starts to live two lives: one inside the Palace that seems most real and the outside world that he finds increasingly foreign and barren…an example of the coarsening effect of the all-pervasive system.

This is not a great novel, but it is not intended to be. Its strength is in its exploration of political and social features and dangers that have resonance beyond just an analysis of totalitarian systems. show less

A acção passa-se no império Otomano no século XIX, descreve o complicado tabuleiro geopolítico dos Balcãs e faz referência à história da Albânia e às conflituosas ligações com estados vizinhos como Bósnia, Turquia e Kosovo.

Desde a antiguidade que o mundo reconheceu a importância dos sonhos, desde o Oráculo de Delfos até aos quiromantes romanos. Contudo, esta é a primeira vez que a explicação dos sonhos é institucionalizada, o Palácio dos Sonhos.

O medo irracional do Sultão, a tirania disfarçada de controlo, com o intuito de encontrar eventuais mensagens escondidas nos sonhos da população em prol do império, tornam o Palácio como uma sofisticada polícia do subconsciente.

A pesada superstrutura burocrática deste Palácio, a sua imponência, solidão e austeridade, transporta-nos para um mundo kafkiano, ainda mais invasivo, despersonalizado e trágico.

The Palace of Dreams, written in Tirana between 1976 and 1981, takes us into an entirely different universe set at the fictitious crossroads of a 20th century dictatorship and the 14th century Ottoman Empire. Characters from those ancient times mix with contemporary characters—state employees and office clerks reminiscent of Kafka’s world—in a bureaucratic labyrinth identical to any other bureaucracy, save for its purpose: to collect, sort, interpret and finally choose the “Master-dream” of all the dreams dreamt throughout the Empire, and to decipher in it the fate of the Empire and of its rulers.

The Palace of Dreams incorporates the traits of all powerful secret institutions—one cannot help think of the Sigurimi, the Albanian Secret Police of the Communist era—as well as the characteristics of an almost Totemic figure, a Kafkaesque Castle whose rules no one can figure out. Kadare himself has declared that this is probably his best novel from a literary standpoint, and very likely his most courageous, an opinion the Albanian Communist regime must have agreed with, considering that shortly after its release the novel was banned.

But Kadare’s genius is such that, in the end, the Palace of Dreams has no precise signification, except that revealed by its name. It is a fabulous, otherworldly place where the “real world” doesn’t exist, sleep is reality’s only substance, and it isn’t the real, as we know from Freud, that brings the dream into being, show more but the other way around. Thus, at the end of the novel, one of the dreams that the main character, Mark-Alem Quprili, who works at the Palace, sorted and filed at the beginning of the novel, makes an unexpected appearance, literally acting upon the present and causing the drama the reader has been anticipating all along. show less

The Palace of Dreams was originally banned when its was published in 1981, it was unavailable in Albanian the home of Ismail Kadare. In 1981 Albania would certainly never have been receptive to any book criticising tyranny and oppression especially as that was something the country specialised in at the time.

Mark-Alem is about to start his brand new job at The Palace of Dreams though he has no idea how he got the job or what the job entails. He discovers that because he is a Quprilis will help him in the long term, He discovers that he is now working in the heart of the Sultan’s empire. This is a place where every dream a citizen has is collected and interpreted. It has been explained to him that they need to find the ‘master dreamers’ as they will provide clues to the destiny of the empire. He is also aware of how the empire controls every aspect of the citizens life and that they may disappear at any point. Rather like dreams.

An interesting story that is a reminder that all totalitarian societies like to control the thoughts and actions of their citizens. A warning from history for the future.

This is a difficult to book to evaluate as it comes in English from Albanian via French, and I wonder if the extra translation step flattened the prose a bit. As it is, it reads as an extended allegory of the surveillance state: something that once applied to Eastern Europe, but now seems to be extending to the wider world. Thus, a "Palace of Dreams," where dreams are sorted, interpreted, and a select few sent to the highest authority is a hell where all thoughts are public...much as my thoughts on this book are now public.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2781324.html

This was the novel that got Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, into trouble with the Communist authorities when it was written and sneakily published in 1980 and 1981. Our protagonist, Mark-Alem of the ancient Quprili family, is recruited to the Palace of Dreams in the capital of the Empire, where feuding bureaucrats together analyse and report on the portents opened up to the Imperial rulers through the dreams of the populace. You don't have to be very smart to see this as a rather clear analogy of the Sigurimi under the Hoxha regime, gathering information neurotically and monitoring the loyalty of the population closely, yet also vulnerable at the top to the whims of the man at the very centre of the state.

The Writers' Plenum which condemned the book showed only that they could not appreciate the talent they had amongst them. As well as being rather like a Kafka story told by an insider, Kadare adopts a lot of Latin American-style magical realism in the story (there is a particularly bizarre and vivid police raid on a dinner party). My linguistic instincts are sharp enough also to spot that there is something going on with the protagonist's name: Qubrili, we are told, is linked with the word for "bridge", in modern Turkish "köprü"; but of course the standard Albania word for bridge these days is "urë", and what it anyway made me think of was the novel by Ivo Andrić of the old Yugoslavia, Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge show more on the Drina (the modern word is "most" rather than "ćuprija"). It would be interesting for someone to do an annotated edition of this some time.

Edited to add: I was over-analysing here. The Albanian Köprülü / Qubrili family were indeed a perfectly real powerful political family in the Ottoman empire, so there is no explicit reference by Kadare to Andrić. show less

Pallati i Ëndrrave” është një nga romanet thelbësore të Ismail Kadaresë, me frymën e epikës, të cilën letërsia europiane e quante të shteruar: me njëmbëdhjetë romane, - titujt kryesorë të të cilëve po përkthehen herë pas here, vepra e tij vazhdimisht ka qenë në listën e kandidaturave për çmimin “Nobel”, në emër të letërsisë së Shqipërisë. Ai do ta meritonte atë çmim edhe sikur të kishte shkruar vetëm “Pallati i Ëndrrave”, si hipotezë mbi historinë e vërtetë të viktimave të vrasjeve të mëdha ose mbi atë pagjumësi kolektive që perandoria otomane nuk mund të tolerojë.

“The idea behind the Sovereign’s creation of the Tabir (Palace of Dreams) is that Allah looses a forewarning dream on the world as casually as He unleashes a flash of lightning or draws a rainbow or suddenly sends a comet close to us, drawn from the mysterious depths of the Universe. He dispatches a signal to the earth without bothering about where it will land; He is too far away to be concerned with such details. It is up to us to find out where the dream has come to earth - to flush it out from among millions, billions of others, as one might look for a pearl lost in the desert. For the interpretation of that dream, fallen like a stray spark into the brain of one out of millions of sleeper, may help to save the country or its Sovereign from disaster; may help to avert war or plague or to create new ideas.”

Dreams, the surreal stories garnered from sleep, from the edge of death itself, do not belong to the dreamer but to the State. And it is in the Palace of Dreams that these dreams are reviewed, interpreted, and filed. Thousands upon thousands of dreams are stored within the Palace walls and each one is pored over carefully. And woe is the dreamer whose dream is chosen as the master-dream.

Though Mark-Alem, son of a noble family and recent employee at the Palace, is the main protagonist in the story, it was the Palace itself that was at the heart of the story. Kadare gave substance to this mysterious and sinister place and though I probably will forget about show more Mark-Alem in a few months the Palace will remain with me for a long time.

Another fine Kadare book though more surreal than the earlier ones I’ve read. show less

11 days is quite some time to be spending reading a book of only 239 pages. At least it usually is when I read. But, this is a different book.
Not an easy one, that's for sure.
First of all because of the tone, the style of writing. It is quite sombre, dark, melancholic. I tend to say that makes it a typical Eastern European book.
The subject, of the book is also quite hard to grasp. Not the plain facts, but the rest. Why would a governement want a 'factory' where dreams from all people in the empire are gathered and analyzed? Where weekly the masterdream is elected and brought to the sovereign?

Lots of clerks work there, they are unhappy, sad, afraid. There are strict rules, a strict devision of the various departments. People can climb up, but only after years and years.
But not Eby Qerim, who belongs to a family that has influence. In the background corruption, power plays, fear, and patronage play important roles in the unfolding of the events.

The events... As if a lot is happening n this book. That is not the case. And nonetheless I could not put it down or stop thinking about it or about the images, the sphere it brought up in me. I'll certainly chew on it for some time, before I can finally let go.

Rejeton d’une illustre famille de grands serviteurs de l’État, Mark-Alem est embauché dans la plus secrète , la plus puissante, la plus terrifiante institution qui se puisse imaginer : une administration chargée de collecter, jusque dans les provinces les plus reculées, les songes de tout un chacun, de les rassembler dans un lieu unique, puis de les trier, de les classer, de les interpréter, afin d’isoler ces « maîtres-rêves » dans lesquels le destin de l’Empire et de son tyran pourra être déchiffré. Cercle après cercle, Mark-Alem est promu dans les instances concentriques de ce haut-lieu de pouvoir, jusqu’à en devenir le maître tout puissant. Mais un maître hanté par la crainte d’être à son tour broyé par la bureaucratie infernale qu’il dirige : ne finira-t-il pas par lire un jour, dans le rébus de quelque rêve anonyme, la disgrâce et la condamnation de sa propre famille ?

This is a psychological novel set in an oppressive country, combining features of both Ottoman empirical rule and more modern day Communist rule. Mark-Alem of the famous Quprili family takes a job within the forbidding castle of Tabir Sarrail, the palace of dreams of the title.

This building and his awkward entry into is quite representative of the dream world. The employees endeavor to classify and interpret dreams that are funnelled into this complex. The goal is to find the master dream that will help the sultan in his political rule. It is like finding a needle in a haystack, or perhaps, it rally doesn't matter -- you're never quite sure.

Despite his uncertain, if not edgy, feelings throughout, Mark-Alem advances quite rapidly. A close member of his family is sequestered by the authorities, but that doesn't seem to affect Mark's career. Everyhting is very secretive and you're never sure why things happen. Even Mark-Alem is never sure how he finds his way through the building. He never quite makes any friends at the palace. Even when Mark Advances into supervision, there is no proper human relationship between people. The dream symbology seems to be appropriate for this world, with its oblique meanings that only point, but do not denote. But the story does grab you, and there is sufficient action to give you pause.

Dry, derivative, and dispassionate.

I did not read this book. The premise appealed to me (dystopian world where citizens' dreams are collected for analysis), as did the fact that the book was immediately banned in Albania upon publication. However, this edition was translated into French and then into English, rendering the prose into a stilted mess akin to Terminator-era Schwarzenegger speech. Run away, run far away. Or read it in French, or better yet, Albanian. One star for the translation debacle, not the content, which still remains a mystery to me.

Las preocupaciones que dominan la literatura de Kadaré le conducen a abordar problemas inquietantes, graves, muchos de ellos sin desenlace ni tratamiento amables. El Palacio de los Sueños es uno de sus logros más perfectos e inquietantes, su mejor alegoría del poder totalitario y la novela que le colocó en posición de mayor riesgo personal al ser publicada en 1981 y condenada al silencio durante los siete años posteriores.

El joven Mark-Alem, vástago de los Quyprilli, influyente familia de procedencia albanesa, y promotora de importantes reformas en el seno del Imperio Otomano, consigue un atractivo puesto de funcionario en EL PALACIO DE LOS SUEÑOS, inquietante organismo estatal al que cada ciudadano está obligado a enviar por escrito un informe de lo soñado durante la noche.

Très inspiré des scènes cauchemardesques et absurdes de Kafka