THE PYRAMID

The seventh novel to have appeared in English from the Albanian author (of, most notably, Chronicle in Stone, 1987, and The Concert, 1994) who is frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. This is a parable, set in Egypt in the twenty-sixth century B.C. and after, about the building of the pyramids as a tactic employed by the state to involve its populace in a vast ongoing (and ``useless'') project designed to instill fear and suppress dissent. Kadare develops his core idea with dry funereal wit and trains a sardonic eye on the novel's only real character, the surly, megalomaniac young pharaoh Cheops. But the book devolves into disconnected (though chronological) mockery of the illogic and paranoia exhibited by ancient Egyptian—and, by extension, contemporary European—tyrannical regimes, and is further scuttled by a lumpy translation (at a second remove from the original) blemished by slangy anachronisms. A below-par performance by a world-class writer.