By Amelia Nierenberg
Ismail Kadare, the most celebrated Albanian author in a generation, was a prolific writer who often found ways to criticise the country’s totalitarian state, despite the risks involved. Frequently, he veiled his contempt in myth and parable.
As his work was translated, into French and many other languages, Kadare offered the West a glimpse of life in what was for years a very closed society, and the last country in Europe to ditch communism. He died on July 1 in Tirana, Albania’s capital, at 88.
Kadare rose to international fame during one of Albania’s darkest chapters: the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, the communist tyrant who died in 1985. For decades, Kadare lived in fear. He walked a careful line, alternately criticising and placating the regime.
Sometimes, he was celebrated. Sometimes, he was banished. In the mid-1980s, he had to smuggle his manuscripts out of the country. And still, Albanians celebrated him — at home and abroad. “There is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book,” David Binder wrote in The New York Times in 1990, shortly after Kadare fled to Paris.
Kadare had been regularly floated for the Nobel Prize. Some have compared him to George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera — who also often turned to metaphor, humor and myth to publish stories critical of state power and violent control. In 2005, Kadare received the first Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), which was then awarded for an author’s entire body of work.
“The only act of resistance possible in a classic Stalinist regime was to write,” said Kadare, after he won the prize. His novels, draped in legend, doused in satire and often disguised in metaphor, frequently provided readers with a lucid window into the psychology of oppression.
Here are some of the books that best represent Kadare’s work.
The General of the Dead Army (1971)
The novel, set 20 years after World War II, follows an Italian general who is sent back to Albania to disinter and repatriate thousands of Italian soldiers’ bodies. The countryside is menacing; the Italian is self-important. But what begins as a seeming allegory about the superiority of the West unravels as the general ignores a priest’s warnings about ancient codes.
Broken April (1990)
In this novel, Kadare examines the violence, logic and constriction of blood feuds. A young man avenges his brother’s death. Then, he has 30 days to hide before the other family’s surviving sons hunt him down, too. In the truce, his fate intersects with that of honeymooners who have come to observe his Albanian mountain village’s customs.
The Palace of Dreams (1993)
This novel, a subversive and damning critique of authoritarianism, came after Kadare was banished to a remote village for a poem excoriating the Politburo. “Palace,” set during the Ottoman Empire, is a fantasy of a vast bureaucracy devoted to collecting dreams. Kadare gazes out onto a state that combs through its citizens’ sleep for signs of dissidence — and reports the most dangerous.
The Three-Arched Bridge (1997)
Kadare traveled far back in time — to 1377 — to write this slim, dark novel set in another tense time for the Balkans. The narrator, an Albanian monk, watches as Turkey’s armies encroach. As the soldiers get closer and a bridge rises, the suspense mounts and the winds of favor change.
The Successor” (2005)
This novel, a disorienting whodunit, was the first to come out in the United States after Kadare was awarded the inaugural International Booker Prize. It is set in the years before Hoxha dies and is loosely based on the death, allegedly by suicide, of his presumed successor.
Twilight of the Eastern Gods (2014)
As Hoxha is breaking away from the USSR, Boris Pasternak — the author of “Doctor Zhivago” — is announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize. An extensive campaign against him begins across the Soviet Union in 1958, watched by Kadare’s narrator — a student at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, where Kadare also once studied.
A Dictator Calls (2023)
Kadare reimagines a 1934 call between Josef Stalin and Pasternak, about the arrest of Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. Kadare weaves together facts and dreams to reconstruct the 3-minute-long call, crafting “a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny,” the Booker Prizes wrote in their citation. — The New York Times
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