Ismail Kadare Book Guide

By Emilia Nirenberg

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.

Kadare’s works, translated into French and many other languages, gave Westerners a glimpse into life in Albania, the last country in Europe to abandon communism, a society that has been very closed for many years. Kadare died in Tirana, the capital of Albania, on July 1 at the age of 88.

Kadare rose to prominence during one of Albania’s darkest periods, the dictatorship of communist tyrant Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985. For decades, Kadare lived in fear, treading carefully, sometimes criticizing the regime and sometimes appeasing it.

Sometimes he was admired. Sometimes he was exiled. In the mid-1980s, he had to smuggle his manuscripts out of the country. But Albanians still admired him — at home and abroad. “Almost every Albanian family has a copy of Kadare’s book,” David Binder wrote in The New York Times in 1990, shortly after Kadare fled to Paris.

Kadare has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. He has been compared to George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera, all of whom have also used metaphor, humor and myth to deliver stories critical of 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 awarded only to a single author 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 irony and often use metaphors, often offering readers a clear window into the psychology of oppression.

Here are some of the books that best represent Kadare’s work.

General of the Dead Army (1971)

Set 20 years after the end of World War II, the novel tells the story of an Italian general sent back to Albania to exhume and repatriate the bodies of thousands of Italian soldiers. The Albanian countryside is treacherous and the Italians hold themselves in high esteem. But what begins as an allegory of Western superiority begins to unravel as the general ignores a priest’s warnings about an ancient code of law.

Broken April (1990)

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.

Dream Palace (1993)

The novel is a subversive, scathing critique of authoritarianism, written after Kadare was exiled to a remote village for a poem critical of the Politburo. Set in the Ottoman Empire, The Palace tells the fantastical story of a vast bureaucracy devoted to collecting dreams. Kadare looks at a country that searches its citizens’ sleep for signs of dissent—and reports on the most dangerous ones.

Three Arch Bridge (1997)

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.

Successor (2005)

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.

Twilight of the Eastern Gods (2014)

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.

The Dictator Calls(2023)

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 said. – The New York Times