A valuable account of life under oppression - though not a great novella : Kadare

Ismail Kadare's "Agammemnon's Daughter," a novella written in Albanian in 1984, smuggled into France and not published under the author's name till the fall of the Hoxner regime in the mid-90s, is a curiosity, best appreciated as a documentary record of the history of communist oppression rather than as a great literary novella - because that it's not, it's a pretty straightforward account of a young man watching the May Day parade in Tirana and concerned that his girlfriend seems to have abandoned him and speculating that she did so for political reasons, her father's orders, perhaps, as he is destined to rise in the hierarchy and doesn't want her associating with people such as the protagonist who may be a threat to the state (though the protagonist himself has procured a coveted invite to the viewing stands, and he's not sure how or why) - there's much comparison between the girl's dumping him and Agammemnon's sacrifice of his own daughter on the eve of departure for the Trojan War - well, this is a little grandiose, isn't it? Maybe she's just not that into him. Anyway, we get a good glimpse of the Kafkaesque world of the oppressive regime, in which people can be fired, demoted, replaced, displaced, or killed for the slightest antistate comment and everyone is looking over shoulders and looking for signs of who's in who's out - it's a snapshot, but it's not that well developed dramatically, the confrontations promised never occur. I appreciate that it was written under great duress and its publication was nothing less than heroic, but these very pressures may have prevented Kadare from developing this novella into the work it might have been.