I learned that Ismail Kadare has died. One of my favorite writers. Whom I discovered in the 70s with The General of the Dead Armyat a time when Albania was a kind of hard-line communist country. After reading this book, I couldn’t stop reading his other novels, each more exciting than the last, so much was I won over by the style he adopted and the themes he addressed.
The Great Winter, The concert, Who brought back Doruntine?, Twilight of the Steppe Gods, Chronicle of the Stone City, Broken April, The H file and then his tests The Albanian Spring, Aeschylus or the eternal loser, Invitation to the writer’s workshopI could not understand that in this Stalinist dictatorship where socialist realism triumphed, works could be as free, comic, lyrical and modern as those of Kadaré.
I am not a specialist, like Eric Faye or Alain Bosquet, of the Albanian author but I like the popular and modern style of his novels. Eric Faye tells in an interview with Stéphane Lépine in his fascinating show Literary Landscapethat what he admires in Kadaré is the constant quality of his work: each new novel is always good. He is right. Kadaré’s stories, steeped in oral tradition, rumors, rituals and an immense literary culture, are always jubilant.
At the worst of Enver Hoxha’s regime, Kadare fled his country for France. Now that Albania is a democracy, Kadare regularly shuttled between the two countries. He spoke very good French. It is worth listening again on YouTube to Kadare’s meeting with Bernard Pivot, who explicitly wishes that the author ofBroken April receive the Nobel Prize. He will not have it.
It is said that it was the ambiguous link he maintained with the regime of the time that harmed Kadaré’s candidacy for the ultimate consecration he deserved, so exceptional and remarkable is his work. As a young man, Kadaré studied at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, before the break between the Soviet Union and Albania. His fictions, steeped in the magic of the legends of the “Land of the Eagles”, with their unique, Homeric breath, imbued with this endearing culture of the Balkans, remind me of these great Russian novels of the 19th century.e century with something of the contemporary fable of a Gabriel García Márquez or a Milan Kundera.
I still have some fabulous stories to discover from this great magician of words. I’ll dive back into them tomorrow.