Ismail Kadare, the most famous Albanian writer of his generation, was a prolific writer who often found ways to criticize his country’s totalitarian state despite the risks. He often used myth and fable to mask his disdain.
With his works translated into French and many other languages, Kadare has given Westerners a glimpse into the A very closed societyand was the last country in Europe to abandon communism. Died on Monday Located in Tirana, the capital of Albania, at the age of 88.
Kadare rose to fame during one of Albania’s darkest periods: dictatorship of Enver HoxhaThe communist tyrant died in 1985. For decades, Kadare lived in fear, treading cautiously, sometimes criticizing the regime and sometimes appeasing it.
Sometimes he was praised. Sometimes he was expelled. In the mid-1980s, he had to smuggle his manuscripts out of the country.
Despite this, Albanians still commemorate him at home and abroad. “Almost every Albanian family has a copy of Kadare’s book,” said David Binder. Writing in The New York Times in 1990Soon after, Kadare fled to Paris.
Kadarezen Regular Floating Nobel Prize. Some people Compare him to George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera – they also often used metaphor, humor and myth to deliver stories that criticized state power and violent control. In 2005, Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which at the time was only awarded to a single writer for his entire oeuvre.
“Under a typical Stalinist regime, the only possible act of resistance was writing,” Kadare said after receiving the award.
His novels are larger-than-life, full of satire, and frequently use metaphors, often offering readers a clear window into the psychology of oppression.
“Albania has remained isolated, impoverished, nearly overwhelmed by offensives and counteroffensives from both East and West, and has resisted stubbornly, pursuing the age-old code of retaliatory violence and blood feuds.” Richard Ede Written by 2008. “Kadale draws us into its strangeness, and we ourselves become strange.”
Here are some of the books that best represent Kadare’s work.
Note: Kadare’s works were originally published in Albanian and frequently translated into French. The dates given here are those of the first English editions.
Kadare shot to fame in 1970 when this unforgettable novel (first published in Albanian in 1963) was translated into French. European critics called it a masterpiece.
Set 20 years after the end of World War II, this novel tells the story of an Italian general sent back to Albania to dig up and repatriate the bodies of thousands of Italian soldiers. The countryside is treacherous and the Italians are pretentious.
However, this fable of Western superiority begins to unravel when the general ignores the priest’s warnings about ancient legal codes.
In this novel, Kadare explores the violence, logic, and constraints of blood feuds. A young man avenges his brother’s death. He then has 30 days to go into hiding or the surviving son of another family will hunt him down. During a truce, his fate becomes intertwined with that of honeymooners who come to observe the customs of an Albanian mountain village.
Kadare does not pass judgment on the tit-for-tat murders that have been sweeping the village in a violent pattern for decades. Instead, he dissects the events like a bard telling a chilling tale.
The novel, a subversive and scathing critique of authoritarianism, was written after Kadare was exiled to a remote village for a poem that harshly criticized the Politburo.
Set in the Ottoman Empire, The Palace tells the fantastical story of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting dreams. Kadare bears witness to a state that scrutinizes its citizens’ sleep, looking for signs of dissent and reporting the most sinister situations.
“The novel is full of these little everyday observations, which lull us into an uneasy state of receptivity and then shock us with sudden violence.” David R. Slavitt Writing in The Times in 1993.
Kadare traveled back in time to 1377 to write this slim, dark novel, set during another tense period in the Balkans. The narrator is an Albanian monk who witnesses an invading Turkish army. As the soldiers draw closer, bridges rise, suspense builds, and the wind shifts in his favor.
“Today, as Central and Eastern Europe unravels with the Soviet empire, countries that once stagnated under Communism are awakening to a new order — and old racial hatreds, frozen for a while, are thawing with no discernible less virulence,” Patrick McGrath wrote in The New York Times. 1997 Review.
The novel, a perplexing detective story that was Kadare’s first to be published in the United States after winning the inaugural Booker International Prize, is set in the years before Hoxha’s death and is loosely based on the suicide of his presumed successor.
This thriller chronicles the speculation, anguish, and uncertainty surrounding the Communist cover-up. Rumors stoke fear, fingers point to the truth. Questions arise as Albanians await the final verdict.
“There is a truth to this; a truth in the writer’s extraordinary depiction of tyranny.” Ed Writing in The Times in 2005“In the day, knowledge is power; at night, ignorance is the highest power.”
Hoxha left the Soviet Union just as Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize. In 1958, a massive campaign against him unfolded across the Soviet Union, which Kadare’s narrator witnessed as a student at Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Institute of World Literature.
(He described it as “a factory for the dogmatic rhetoric of the school of socialist realism.”)
The impending division of the country begins to physically affect the unnamed narrator: “All the parts of my body will voluntarily separate and reassemble in the most incredible ways: I might suddenly discover that I have an eye between my ribs, or even two eyes, or that my legs and arms are connected, perhaps allowing me to fly.”
In his recent book, The Dictator Calls, translated by John Hodgson, Finalist International Booker Prize 2024 – Kadare returns to themes of dictatorship, power and oppression.
He also revisited the works of Pasternak.
Kadare reimagines the 1934 phone call between Joseph Stalin and Boris Pasternak about the arrest of Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. Weaving together facts and dreams, Kadare recreates the three-minute conversation, weaving “a gripping story about the relationship between power and political structures, writers and tyranny,” the Booker Prize citation states.
