A guide to the books of Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare, the most celebrated Albanian author in a generation, was a prolific writer who often found ways to criticize the country’s totalitarian state, despite the risks involved. He often cloaked his contempt in myth and parable.

When 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 turn its back on communism. He died on Monday in Tirana, the capital of Albania, at the age of 88.

Kadare rose to international prominence during one of Albania’s darkest chapters: the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, the communist tyrant who died in 1985. Kadare lived in fear for decades. He walked a careful line, alternately criticizing and appeasing 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 yet 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 was frequently nominated for the Nobel Prize. Some have compared him to George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera — who also frequently used metaphor, humour and myth to publish critical stories about 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 oeuvre.

“The only possible act of resistance in a classical Stalinist regime was writing,” Kadare said after winning the prize.

Steeped in legend, steeped in satire and often veiled in metaphor, his novels often offered the reader a clear insight into the psychology of oppression.

“Albania has lived isolated, impoverished, almost as a sideshow in the marches and counter-marches of East and West, and has resisted stubbornly, with an age-old code of retaliatory violence and blood feuds,” wrote Richard Eder in The Times in 2008. “Kadare draws us into its strangeness, and we emerge strange to ourselves.”

Below are some books that best represent Kadare’s work.

Note: Kadare’s works were first published in Albanian, followed by French translations. The dates listed here are for the first English-language editions.

Kadare came to international prominence in 1970, when this gripping novel – first published in Albanian in 1963 – was translated into French. Critics in Europe called it a masterpiece.

Set 20 years after World War II, the novel follows an Italian general who is sent back to Albania to exhume and repatriate the bodies of thousands of Italian soldiers. The countryside is threatening; the Italian is smug.

But what begins as an apparent allegory about the superiority of the West unravels when the general ignores a priest’s warnings about ancient codes.

In this novel, Kadare explores the violence, logic, and constriction of blood feuds. A young man avenges his brother’s death. He then has 30 days to hide before the surviving sons of the other family track him down. In the truce, his fate intersects with that of honeymooners who have come to observe the customs of his Albanian mountain village.

Kadare passes no judgment on the tit-for-tat killings, which seem to have cycled through the village in violent cycles for decades. Instead, he skims through the events, like a bard telling a chilling story.

This novel, a subversive and devastating critique of authoritarianism, came after Kadare was exiled to a remote village for a poem satirizing the Politburo.

“Palace,” set during the Ottoman Empire, is a fantasy of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to collecting dreams. Kadare looks out over a state that combs its citizens’ sleep for signs of dissent — and reports the most dangerous.

“The novel concerns itself with these small, everyday observations, lulling us into an uneasy kind of acceptance, then shocking us with abrupt outbursts of violence,” wrote David R. Slavitt in The Times in 1993.

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 the armies of Turkey approach. As the soldiers draw near and a bridge rises, the tension mounts and the winds change their favor.

“It is hard to miss the analogy with Central and Eastern Europe today, as the Soviet empire unravels and states once in suspended animation under communist rule awaken to a new order – and to age-old ethnic hatreds , which has been frozen for a while but has now thawed without any apparent loss of virulence,” wrote Patrick McGrath in The Times’ 1997 review.

This disorienting whodunit was the first novel to be published in the United States after Kadare won the first International Booker Prize. It is set in the years before Hoxha dies and is loosely based on the death, reportedly by suicide, of his presumed successor.

The thriller winds its way through the speculation, fear and uncertainty of what appears to be a communist cover-up. A rumor stirs fear and a pointing finger turns. Questions pile up as Albanians wait for a final verdict.

“It’s a kind of truth; the truth inherent in the writer’s extraordinary portrait of tyranny,” Eder wrote in The Times in 2005. “By day, knowledge is power; ignorance is the highest power of the night.”

As Hoxha breaks away from the USSR, Boris Pasternak — the author of “Doctor Zhivago” — is declared the winner of the Nobel Prize. In 1958, an extensive campaign against him begins in the Soviet Union, which is followed by Kadare’s narrator — a student at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, where Kadare also once studied.

(He described it as “a factory for manufacturing dogmatic tricks of the school of socialist realism.”)

The coming national schism begins to have a physical effect on the unnamed narrator: “All parts of my body were about to disconnect and put themselves back together of their own free will in the most incredible ways: I might suddenly noticing that I had an eye between my ribs, maybe even both eyes, or my legs attached to my arms, maybe to let me fly.

In his most recent book published in English, “A Dictator Calls” – translated by John Hodgson and on the long list for the International Booker Prize 2024, Kadare returns to the themes of dictatorship, power and repression.

He also returns to Pasternak.

Kadare reinterprets a 1934 telephone conversation between Joseph Stalin and Pasternak, about the arrest of the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. Kadare weaves together facts and dreams to reconstruct the three-minute call, creating “a gripping story about power and political structures, about the relationship between writers and tyranny,” the Booker Prizes wrote in their citation.