A brilliant autopsy on a dead regime

Although writers in languages of lesser currency suffer a cruel disadvantage when striving to establish themselves on the international scene, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has succeeded in leaping that hurdle by the extraordinary athleticism of his writing. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than 40 countries, and in recent times he has been annually tipped as a possible Nobel Prize winner. Shamefully and typically, only his recent winning of the first Man Booker International Prize has caused him at last to be adequately acknowledged in this country.

Although lacking the depth and grandeur of either his first novel The General of the Dead Army or his later masterpiece The Palace of Dreams, The Successor nonetheless provides an excellent introduction to Kadare’s work. Running to little more than 200 pages of unusually large print, it combines all the readability of a crime novel with the innovatory adventurousness of a work created by a writer who, even in his late sixties, never repeats others, much less himself.