Ismail Kadare, one of the best-known Albanian writers in the world, died on Monday in Tirana: he had often been spoken of as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was 88 years old, the news of his death was communicated by his Albanian publishing house, Onufri.
Kadare achieved international fame in the 1970s thanks to his first novel, The general of the dead armypublished in Albania in 1963. It was published in France seven years later and was then translated into 45 languages. It tells the story of two Italian men, an army general and a priest, who travel to Albania with the task of recovering the remains of Italian soldiers who died in the country during the Second World War. In 1983, the book was made into an Italian film of the same name, directed by Luciano Tovoli and starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée and Michel Piccoli.
After the first, Kadare wrote dozens of other novels. Many of them contained attacks on the totalitarian communist regime that was in power in Albania in the second half of the twentieth century: for this reason the writer had many problems in his homeland, although from the 1970s onwards his fame abroad prevented the regime from persecuting him too harshly. The first of his novels critical of the regime, The monster (1965), was initially published in a magazine: due to censorship it could not be released as a book in Albania until 1990. Like other books by Kadare he used references to history, mythology and literature to create metaphors about the contemporary world (for this approach to literary narration over the years the writer was compared to both Franz Kafka and George Orwell). The monster in particular it was a rewriting of the Greek myth of the Trojan War.
It came out in 1981 The palace of dreams, a novel set in an Ottoman Empire used as a model of a totalitarian state featuring a man who works in an institution that analyzes the dreams of all the empire’s subjects to try to decipher them and use them to control the population. Because of this book, in 1982 Kadare was accused of working for the French secret services.
In autumn 1990 Kadare went into exile in France for political reasons, after years of censorship by the regime, which ended a few months later. Since then the writer had lived in Paris for a long time. In 2020 he received the title of grand officer of the Legion of Honour, the third highest title that the French state awards to deserving people for services offered to the country.
In recent years the publishing house La nave di Teseo has republished various of his old books and other more recent ones. The latest published in Italian is Mornings at Café Rostand (2017), translated by Liljana Cuka Maksuti.
