(ANSA) – ROME, JULY 1 – When a Dictator Calls, the last book by Ismail Kadare, the great Albanian writer, poet and screenwriter, who died at 88, will be in Italian bookstores in October 2024 for La nave di Teseo translated by Cettina Caliò. Considered among the best books of 2023 by the ‘Wall Street Journal’, selected for the International Booker Prize 2024, in the 164-page novel Kadare reconstructs, with a fascinating combination of dreamlike moments and investigations into reliable sources, the three minutes of a phone call between Stalin and Pasternak and what this tense, mysterious and very little-known moment in modern history caused. It is said that in June 1934 Joseph Stalin telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. “Comrade Stalin wishes to speak to you”. By interweaving the testimonies of figures linked to Pasternak and Mandelstam, writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Achmatova, and journalists, Kadare creates a gripping novel that highlights the relationship between art and power in which a writer, who should be free by definition, is forced to deal with politics and a bloodthirsty tyrant. A feverish and heartfelt story that reveals disturbing similarities with Kadare’s direct experience when, under Hoxha’s ferocious dictatorship, he too received an unexpected phone call. La nave di Teseo, which is currently republishing the work of Kadare – winner of the first edition of the International Booker Prize in 2005, of the Prince of Asturias Award in 2009, several times nominated for the final selection for the Nobel Prize and honorary member of the Académie française – has published La bambola (2017), La provocazione (2018), Aprile spezzato (2019), La città di pietra (2021), Le mattine al Café Rostand (2021), Il dossier O. (2022) and Il palazzo dei sogni (2023). (ANSA).
