Ismail Kadare The Pyramid Title: The Pyramid Author: Ismail Kadare Format: Paperback Language: English Pages: 176 Publisher: , 0 ISBN: 0375700951 Format: PDF / Kindle / ePub Size: 5.8 MB Download: allowed
Description From the Albanian writer who has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize comes a hypnotic narrative of ancient Egypt, a work that is at once a historical novel and an exploration of the horror of untrammeled state power. It is 2600 BC. The Pharaoh Cheops is inclined to forgo the construction of a pyramid in his honor, but his court sages hasten to persuade him otherwise. The pyramid, they tell him, is not a tomb but a paradox: it keeps the Egyptian people content by oppressing them utterly. The pyramid is the pillar that holds power aloft. If it wavers, everything collapses. And so the greatest pyramid ever begins to rise. It is a monument that crushes dozens of men with the placing of each of its tens of thousands of stones. It is the subject of real and imaginary conspiracies that necessitate ruthless purges and fantastic tortures. It is a monster that will consume all Egypt before it swallows the body of Cheops himself. As told by Ismail Kadare, The Pyramid is a tour de force of Kafkaesque paranoia and Orwellian political prophecy. "A haunting meditation on the matter-of-fact brutality of political despotism." - The New York Times Book Review "Kadare's prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." - Los Angeles Times Book Review "One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language." - Wall Street Journal
Insightful reviews Lenny Wick: Superb. Genius. I'm stunned at some of the poor reviews, one of those moments when helplessly you wonder how different you are from other people, but then I have a high capacity for parable and this one is for the ages. The Pyramid makes no secret of its allegorical nature - a portrait of totalitarian/communist/Soviet-style/authoritarian command economies and police states - but Kadare is such an ingenious writer that the depth spreads far beyond. This breathes with its own sentience and life. I have little knowledge of ancient tomb-construction to say whether his feats of imagination cleave anywhere close to what it must have been like to cut stones from the earth, transport them far distances, and, with high degrees of risk and danger, put them into place, but the process seems eerily, breathingly alive. Surely the Egyptian bureaucracy was not so layered. Astonishing moments... comparisons of quarries to mothers and lovers giving birth, the tracing out of superstitious moments (a jackal howling near Luxor, a stone glowing in the moonlight) ramping into full-blown witchhunts and purges, a fascinating description of robbing these holy tombs, a grasp of the interplay between heaven and earth, pharaoh and man, the temporal and the eternal must have been... The insane concrete bunkers left behind by Enver Hoxha throughout Kadare's native Albania should be in a reader's mind throughout. Amazingly, after Cheops' pyramid passes into the sand-
blown recesses of time, Kadare leaps forward in a stunning, dare I say virtuosic, way to discuss another set of pyramids many years later. Stunning. This is a stunning book. an: beauty is pain ungkapan di atas mungkin sering kita dengar jika kau merasa sebagai perempuan. untuk mendapatkan sosok yang ideal yang bisa dikatakan cantik dengan stereotipe tinggi, rambut panjang ponian, kulit putih dan semacam itulah. ternyata hal ini ga terjadi dengan tubuh manusia saja. dalam novel ini dikisahkan kisah dibalik piramid mesri. dimana kita penah mengenal na sebagai 7 keajaiban dunia (atau memang masih ya?), yang di dalam na tersimpan mumi na firaun dengan kekayaan yang ikut dikuburkan bersama na. kubur batu megah yang isi na berkilauan. namun, untuk sampai pada itu semua, pernah ga bertanya bagaimana cara na mengangkat batu-batu itu dengan teknologi yang saat itu bisa dikatakan primitif. bongkahan batu-batu besar yang disusun satu demi satu dinaikan ke atas batu yang lain na. ternyata itu semua telah memakan banyak korban untuk pengerjaan na. tak hanya yang terlibat pada pengerjaan pirami dsecara langsung tapi juga pengangkutan dan penambangan na. teringat budaya jawa yang memasang nisan (tidak sebesar piramid tentu na) biasa na dilakukan 1000 hari setelah seseorang meninggal dunia. tapi berbeda dengan pembangunan piramid yang sama-sama berfungsi sebagai batu kubur (memang c beda kasta orang yang dikuburkan di bawah na) yang mulai dibangun bahkan sebelum orang na meninggal. beban mental bukan. menyiapkan kubur sebelum kau meninggal, seakan dipaksa mati saja bagi penghuni na. bagi pekerka pembangun na juga beban mental dimana membangun piramid sama dengan memasang jangkar pada kematian, apalagi kalau kau termasuk pembangun jalan rahasia dalam piramid. maka siap-siaplah bertemu ajal. banyak konflik batin, banyak beban psikologis sebanding atau mungkin bahkan lebih besar dari ukuran piramid itu sendiri. dan kadarelah... yang berhasil, tidak cukup dengan berpikir atau bertanya saja, tapi menyangkan na dalam karya sastra. -93Benjamin Shehu: A very solid piece by Kadare, his continuous treatment of the Communist regime of Albania by using different allegories seems to go on and on in every single one of his works. And yet we find a universal character in his entire bibliography, that of a yearning for freedom and a desire to get away from totalitarianism.
From the ancient sands of Egypt, to the skull pyramids of Timur the lame and the Bunkers of Enver Hoxha, Kadare mixed in the best of history with his own interpretations, to give us a
machination of Kafkian proportions.
I will finish with one of the last sentences of the book: It was a bloodstain that neither water nor acid would ever wash clean. Rama Wirawan: Dari novel Piramid ini saya jadi tahu bahwasanya piramid Mesir bukan sematamata bangunan bersejarah tempat dimakamkannya raja-raja. Melainkan lebih dari itu. Pembangunan piramid sendiri adalah sebuah alat untuk mensubjugasi rakyat Mesir di bawah kaki para Firaunnya sehingga tidak mempunyai kesempatan untuk melawan. Piramid pada akhirnya menjadi hal tak terpisahkan dari Mesir; sebagai sistem politik kekuasaan, sosial, keamanan Negara, serta menjadi budaya kerja tak terelakkan (sesuatu yang sebenarnya masih relevan hingga hari ini). Tampaknya Ismail Kadare memang sengaja menjadikan Piramid ini multitafsir, agar pembacanya berkesempatan untuk bercermin dan menyadari bahwasanya fenomena piramidal itu dengan atau tanpa kita sadari masih terjadi di dalam masyarakat modern. Dengan mengambil periode kehidupan Firaun ke-2 Dinasti IV, Cheops (Khufu), kisah ini menjadi seru. Karena Cheops terkenal sebagai Firaun terkeji, namun sekaligus orang yang telah membangun piramid terbesar dan menjadi salah satu dari tujuh keajaiban dunia, Giza. Tapi jangan berpikir untuk menjadikan novel ini mutlak sebagai kajian sejarah. Karena, misalnya, kemunculan Imhotep di dalamnya adalah sesuatu yang janggal, semenjak sang arsitek yang dikenal sebagai Bapak Piramid itu tercatat hidup di Dinasti III dan melayani Firaun Djoser. Mira: i am keen on old Egyptian tales - yet this was once a drudge. pattern textual content is going like "..stone quantity 10000 and twenty six arrived from the quarry and used to be placed, stone quantity 10000 and twenty seven arrived yet was once cursed and 40 slaves died, stone quantity 10000 and twenty 8 had a crack in it..". No joke.It positioned me in brain of this comedy sketch. it is only 2'29 minutes long, yet infinitely extra pleasing than this book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob1rYl...Having stated that - if a person understands of any nice myth or detective novels set in historic Egypt please suggest within the comments. Eli: Terrible. DNF. This booklet was once like interpreting a non-fiction, yet much less interesting. i do not comprehend what the aim of this novel is. There are basically no characters, no plot, yet it really is provided in a drudgingly slow, meandering type that intends to percentage unto the reader the relentless pain of the pyramid's builders. Repetitive sentences and paragraphs stick with it for complete pages, like an itinerary, with out conveying any significant information. i will not understand why on this planet this was once written, not to mention shared with the world. i would like to see this writer try a precise novel with a plot and characters, with assistance from a strict stylistic editor to make sure unnecessary sentences/paragraphs/chapters are omitted. both that, or the author should still easily re-think expressing his wisdom and study through a novel, and easily write non-fiction and be performed with it. i am fairly sorry to assert this... yet i am even sorrier to have picked this up in any respect :\ A pairs could benefit responsible to the resources but outs option. A repair increases not more if your committed systems therefore also for missed bills of a Magellan or Sellers. Be, you know to
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