Ismail Kadare

Two destinies intersect in *Broken April*. The first is that of Gjor, a young mountaineer who (much against his will) has just killed a man in order to avenge the death of his older brother, and who expects to be killed himself in keeping with the provisions of the Code that regulates life in the highlands. The second is that of a young couple on their honeymoon who have come to study the age-old customs of the place, including the blood feud. While the story is set in the early twentieth century, life on the high plateaus of Albania takes life back to the Dark Ages. The bloody shirt of the latest victim is hung up by the bereaved for all to see—until the avenger in turn kills his man with a rifle shot. For the young bride, the shock of this unending cycle of obligatory murder is devastating. The horror becomes personified when she catches a glimpse of Gjor as he wanders about the countryside, waiting for the truce of thirty days to end, and life with it. That momentary vision of the hapless murderer provokes in her a violent act of revulsion and contrition. Her life will be marked by it always. **

During the Second World War, a young boy witnesses his hometown in Albania fall to a series of invaders: first Italian fascists, then the Greeks, the Italians once again and finally Nazi hordes. Amid floods and bombings, he undergoes another kind of turbulence - growing up. Chronicle in Stone is an early masterpiece from the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize and one of the most significant European writers of the last fifty years.

Masterful in its simplicity, Chronicle in Stone is a touching coming-of-age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy’s eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty—as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things, but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy’s story are tantalizing fragments of the city’s history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.

June 28, 1389: Six hundred years before Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic called for the repression of the Albanian majority in Kosovo, there took place, on the Field of the Blackbirds, a battle shrouded in legend. A coalition of Serbs, Albanian Catholics, Bosnians, and Romanians confronted and were defeated by the invading Ottoman army of the Sultan Murad. This battle established the Muslim foothold in Europe and became the centerpiece of Serbian nationalist ideology, justifying the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars that the world witnessed with horror at the end of the past century. In this eloquent and timely reflection on war, memory, and the destiny of two peoples, Ismail Kadare explores in fiction the legend and the consequences of that defeat. Elegy for Kosovo is a heartfelt yet clear-eyed lament for a land riven by hatreds as old as the Homeric epics and as young as the latest news broadcast.

In a small town at the foot of the northern highlands in Albania, a decade after the fall of the Communist regime, the harsh blood-for-blood law of the fearsome *Kanun* mountain folk is emerging from hibernation, like everything else that was forbidden under the fifty years of Communist rule. Mysterious happenings that are two thousand years old, two centuries old, or even just two years old reemerge in daily life. The marriage of a girl and a snake is not just a legend but a news item—a cyclical event that is as much part of the modern world as of the ancient one. Set against this Kafkaesque backdrop, a simple and sensual love story between a painter and a young woman stands out as light against dark. With its rich and somber story of local traditions and universal themes, *Spring Flowers, Spring Frost* is a masterpiece belonging to Kadare’s purest classical vein. **

A glimpse into the melting pot of reputations and rumours in the twilight years of communism in Albania, as the morning's orthodoxies become heresies by dinner-time, and everyone must step nimbly to keep out of jail. The fragile nature of political realities in present-day China too, is summed up. ### From Publishers Weekly Set in the mid-1970s, as the alliance between Albania and Communist China unravels, this subversively inventive satire traces the impact of the zigzagging Albanian party line on the personal lives of a group of friends and associates. These include a jittery Albanian diplomat in Beijing, his jealously insecure wife, an establishment novelist who confronts "the void inside him" and a civil servant who writes an "autocritique" castigating himself for his petty-bourgeois mentality. A Kafkaesque subplot concerns an army officer who's arrested, apparently for refusing to obey an order. Albanian novelist Kadare ( The Palace of Dreams ), who lives in France, sketches a devastating portrait of Mao Zedong as a megalomaniac whose goal is "the brainwashing of the human race." Historical figures like Zhou Enlai and genocidal Cambodian leader Pol Pot appear intermittently in an elliptic narrative spliced with dreams, officers' coerced confessions and short-short stories. China, depicted as a dystopia where simple human relations are stultified and surveillance is a way of life, becomes a mirror image of Albania through Kadare's mordantly ironic vision. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal Under communism, foreign relations between a smaller country and the huge country that serves as its "host" affect the day-to-day lives of many individuals, especially in the smaller country. An Albanian by birth now living in France, Kadare (The Palace of Dreams, LJ 9/1/93) shows how Albania's relationship with China affects the life of Silva Dibra, a government employee, wife, and mother. The endless succession of her days seem to blend together as Silva worries about her husband, Gjergi, who makes sudden and frequent trips to China, and her brother, Arian, who is in the military. She also thinks constantly about her dead sister, Ana. Through Silva, we learn the thoughts of too many other characters: her husband, daughter, brother, co-workers, endless friends, Chairman Mao, Zhou En-lai, and a stream of other Chinese bureaucrats. There are some good, funny ideas here, and a number of chapters would work effectively as short stories. Strung together, however, they create what is essentially a plotless novel that strains the reader's interest. *Olivia Opello, Onondaga Cty. PL, Syracuse, N.Y.* Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. She opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges an Albanian village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider? Based on the story of “The Ballad of Constantine and Doruntine”, an ancient tale that is known wherever Albanian is spoken and whose versions exist in every Balkan language and in several other European folk traditions. The legend tells of a brother, Kostandin, who rises from his grave to fulfil his promise of bringing his married sister Doruntine back from a far-off land to see their dying mother. Revised edition with many additions and title change of Doruntine, published many years ago.

Egypt in the twenty-sixth century BC. The young pharaoh Cheops wants to forgo the construction of a pyramid in his honor, but his court sages hasten to persuade him otherwise. The pyramid, they tell him, is not a tomb but a paradox, designed to appease the masses by oppressing them. It is a symbol of nothing, a useless and infinite project designed to waste the country's wealth and keep security and prosperity, ever the fonts of sedition, constantly at bay. And so the greatest pyramid in the world has ever seen begins to rise. Rumors multiply. A secret police is formed. Conspiracies--real and imagined--swirl around the rising edifice. The most drastic purges follow. By the time the first stone is laid, Cheops's subjects are terrified enough to yield to his most murderous whims. Each time one of the massive stones is hoisted into place, dozens of men are crushed, and there are tens of thousands of stones. . . .

A bridge under construction in 14th Century Albania is secretly sabotaged by ferry men who are afraid of being made redundant. Officially they blame a prophecy that no bridge will stand over the river without human sacrifice to the water spirits. So the builders immure a villager and the bridge gets built. A Balkan parable by the author of The Pyramid.

A surreal, chilling tale of rebellion and tyranny in the Ottoman Empire, by the winner of the Man Booker International Prize. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the main square of Constantinople, a niche is carved into ancient stone. Here, the sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital – a task he relishes and performs with fervour. But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price. A surreal tale of rebellion and tyranny from the master of European literature.'A master storyteller' John Carey

1958\. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author, Boris Pasternak, faces exile, the press hound him and demand that he refuse the award. A few days earlier the young writer found a copy of this book - could those simple pages really be so dangerous? Based on Ismail Kadare's own experience, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a fictionalised recreation of his time as a student at the prestigious Gorky Institute for World Literature - a strange 'factory of the intellect' set up to produce a new generation of Socialist writers. With its drunken nights, uninspiring professors, specially selected students and enforced Socialist Realism his time at the Gorky Institute brought Kadare to the brink of abandoning writing altogether. In English for the first time, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city and a time, it is a story of youth, of disenchantment and of the incredible importance of the written word.