The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare

Every so often as he sat at his desk, he would feel his head grow heavy, and wonder at the pages already written as if it had been someone else who'd penned them. There before him lay the melancholy aggregate of the sleep of one of the vastest empires in the world: more than forty nationalities, representatives of almost all religions and of every race. If the report had included the whole globe, it wouldn't have made much difference. To all intents and purposes it covered the sleep of the entire planet--terrible and infinite shadows, a bottomless abyss from which Mark-Alem was trying to dredge up a few fragments of truth. Hypnos himself, the Greek god of sleep, couldn't have known more than he did about dreams.

Mark-Alem is a member of the prestigious Albanian Quprili family, whose lineage boasts a number of viziers to the Ottoman Empire. But Mark-Alem himself is a bit wayward, young and without prospects, until he is given a job at the Palace of Dreams, an immense bureaucracy where the dreams of the citizens of the Empire are read and analyzed for their portents. The Palace of Dreams, or Tabar Sarrail, as it's known, is perhaps the most powerful institution in the Empire. Kadare depicts it as a series of long, dark, and difficult to navigate corridors; a place like Kafka's Castle. Mark-Alem is uncertain about his work there, and yet he keeps rising through the ranks, from the Selection room to the all-important Interpretation Room, where he pores over the mysterious dreams of his countrymen with little but his own confusion and intuition to guide him.

One thing the Palace of Dreams suggests is that national and historical memory run deep, at a level of the subconscious. We learn that the dreams that topple Sultans are usually received by small men, grocers or farmers; though they mean little to the Empire in practical purposes, their dreams are an expression of the larger political will that moves imperceptibly among a people. "States," we're told, "that had been dead for a long time and reduced to skeletons might slowly arise and reappear in the world." We suspect that among Mark-Alem's powerful uncles are those who seek to reaffirm their Albanian nationality in light of the Empire's homogenizing control; an Albania subsumed within the Empire is one of these dead states that operates something on the level of a dream, hidden in the synapses of even those who think that such things don't concern them much. It's no coincidence that, after some time working in the Tabar Sarrail, Mark begins to wonder if he shouldn't drop the Islamizing Alem from his name in favor of something truer to his Quprili Albanian roots.

One thing that's interesting about The Palace of Dreams is that, even though Mark-Alem moves upward through the ranks of power at the Tabar, he never seems to know what's really going on. The Sultan moves against his uncles and his uncles retaliate against the Sultan, and all, he discovers, on the basis of a dream he had read during his time in Selection, and then again in Interpretation, and dismissed as meaningless. Is Mark-Alem being used? By whom? Can one really become a master of dreams, or are we always the ones who are mastered by them? In the final scenes, Mark-Alem finds himself poring over thousands and thousands of dreams from every corner of the Empire, and yet no wiser about the workings of the world.

With the addition of Albania, my "countries read" list is up to 79!