Introducing Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, and dramatist who was born on 28 January 1936. Update. On July 1st 2024 Ismail Kadare, aged 88, passed away in Tirana after being rushed to hospital, the writer had suffered cardiac arrest.

Since the 1960s, he has been a significant literary personality in Albania. He concentrated on poetry up to the release of The General of the Dead Army, his debut book, which brought him international acclaim.
He was nominated 15 times for the Nobel Prize in literature and received the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Some people consider Kadare to be one of the finest European writers and thinkers of the 20th century as well as a unified voice against totalitarianism.

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Living in Albania during a time of strict censorship, Kadare devised cunning stratagems to outwit Communist censors who had banned three of his books, using devices such as parable, myth, fable, folk-tale, allegory, and legend, sprinkled with double-entendre, allusion, insinuation, satire, and coded messages. In 1990, to escape the Communist regime and its secret police he defected to Paris. His works have been published in 45 languages.

For further background on Ismail Kadare, these are a couple of interesting articles worth a read. First one is about Kadare and Albanian Identity. The other, at World Literature today, is a Why Should We Read Ismail Kadare?

Best Ismail Kadare Books

The Palace of Dreams

The Palace of Dreams, an anti-totalitarian fantasy novel was first published in 1981. In the novel, an authoritarian dystopia (the imaginary U.O.S.; the United Ottoman States) through an enormous bureaucratic entity (the Palace of Dreams) collects every dream in the empire, sorts it, files it, analyses it, and reports the most dangerous ones to the Sultan.

The Siege

Published in 1970, The Siege tells the story of the siege of an Albanian fortress by the Ottoman empire. In the weeks and months that pass without breakthrough we see the exhilaration of despair of the Pasha and his advancing army told through the eyes of a senior officer. Vivid and compelling it neatly mixes tragedy with comedy.

The File on H

In the 1930’s two intrepid American scholars journey to the mountains of Albania where they hope to find and record the oral poetry of minstrals who travel around the region, thinking this was the key to how Homer composed works, such as the Iliad, without ever writing them down.

Accompanied by a crate size tape recorder, they are mistaken for spies and placed under surveillance. This inventive tale, frequently hilarious, was actually loosely based on a true story.

The General of the Dead Army

Twenty years after World War II, an Italian General is tasked with returning to Albania to retrieve the remains of Italian servicemen who died at the hands of the Albanian resistance. The General of the Dead Army is a moving and timely meditation on war and its consequences.

Chronicle in Stone

During the Second World War, a young boy witnesses his hometown in Albania fall to a series of invaders: first Italian fascists, then the Greeks, the Italians once again and finally Nazi hordes. Amid floods and bombings, he undergoes another kind of turbulence – growing up.

Published in 1971, it is set in a little town based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokastër.

The Concert

Set in the mid-1970s, as the alliance between Albania and Communist China unravels, this subversively inventive satire traces the impact of the zigzagging Albanian party line on the personal lives of a group of friends and associates. These include a jittery Albanian diplomat in Beijing, his jealously insecure wife, an establishment novelist who confronts the void inside him and a civil servant who writes an autocritique castigating himself for his petty-bourgeois mentality. A Kafkaesque subplot concerns an army officer who’s arrested, apparently for refusing to obey an order.

Broken April

From the moment that Gjorg’s brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother’s murderer and then in turn be hunted down. After shooting his brother’s killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days’ grace – not enough to see out the month of April.

Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride’s heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these ‘civilised’ strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.

Thanks to simple prose and engaging details, the Kadare makes this tale of harsh yet romantic mountain life ring wonderfully true.

If you enjoyed our article on Ismail Kadare, check out our Kurt Vonnegut profile