Francis King

The witch in the machine

If one asks Albanians who is their greatest living writer, the immediate answer is Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

issue 18 September 2010

If one asks Albanians who is their greatest living writer, the immediate answer is Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005. But the tone of any discussion that follows is all too often grudging or even hostile. The books themselves are hugely popular, their author far less so.

The reason for this is that throughout a period when many Eastern European writers were suffering persecution for their opposition to Stalinist regimes, the worst that ever happened to Kadare was an embargo on his work for three years. A Marxist, he managed to remain on friendly terms with the Albanian dictatorship until two months before the toppling of Enver Hoxa. It was only then that he announced his surely long overdue defection. Such behaviour has not stopped western journalists from referring to him as ‘Albania’s Solzhenitsyn’ — a laudation that he himself, to his credit, has repudiated.

Like many of Kadare’s books, The Accident starts as a murder mystery.

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