If literature is the swirl of history that seeks to deflect us from its own fatal maelstroms, then Ismail Kadare is a worthy laureate of the first Man Booker international prize, announced on 2nd June. The prize, to be given biennially and to complement Man Booker's annual prize for new fiction, recognises writers' "achievement in literature and their significant influence on writers and readers worldwide." The Albanian Kadare's fulfilment of the second part of that encomium could be seen as more latent than actual; this most unknown of European novelists (there are so few translators of Albanian into English that the English versions of his novels come to us translated from French) is, in international commercial terms, a minority interest. Yet there could hardly be a more important witness to one of Europe's darkest chronotopoi: Albania during and after the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha.
Kadare was a participant in Hoxha's madness, itself a symbol of the insane tension between east and west during the cold war. He was also a critic of Albanian politics post-Hoxha, as the country slid towards anarchy in the mid-1990s, and of the west's appeasement of Milosevic; as early as 1993, on the first occasion I met him, he averred that Kosovo was the Serbian leader's final destination. However, and rightly, he says that he is not a political writer: "Being critical of a regime is a normal state of affairs for a writer. The only act of resistance possible in a classic Stalinist regime was to write—or you could go to a meeting and say something very courageous, and then be shot." We are back to the first definition: to the swirl of history, the writer's version of the truth, that salvages us and sweeps us towards freedom.
Born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, a magnificent fortress-city a dozen miles from the Greek border, Kadare was three when King Zog finished giving Albania away piece by piece to the Italians. His childhood was an immersion course in the tidal movements of history. Under the purple mountains of Epirus he watched three armies march and counter-march: first the Italians, going south emblazoned with flags (and retinue of nuns, plus field brothel); then the Greeks, repulsing flags, guns, nuns and bordello; and finally Hitler's Wehrmacht. These reversals taught him the temporary nature of things. His uncles were rich communists who owned books. He copied out Macbeth at the age of 11, and he began to understand that there was a "great universal literature" beyond the contradictions of daily life: "Nothing else," he writes, "had the power to force my spirit."
He studied at Moscow's Gorky Institute, and loathed the beige raincoats of the well-fed members of the Writers' Union. He started a novel called The Town Without Signs, in which a pair of students set out to reinvent a lost Albanian text. In Tirana he published 25 pages, and it was banned overnight. "It was a good thing this happened. In the early 1960s, life in Albania was pleasant and well organised—a writer would not have known he should not write about the falsification of history." His first published novel, in 1963, was The General of the Dead Army, later filmed with Marcello Mastroianni in the role of the Italian general sent to Albania to repatriate the remains of Italian soldiers killed during the war. Through the 1960s and 1970s there followed a stream of publications, interdicted or half-tolerated (in translation we have Chronicle in Stone, on his boyhood in Gjirokastër; The Three Arched Bridge, a parable of xenophobia; Broken April, his account of the Balkan blood feud; and The File on H…, a half serious comedy of two western researchers looking for the birthplace of Homer in northern Albania). His work made brief appearances, in bookshops stacked to the ceiling with Hoxha's multi-volume torrents. Because readers knew he might be banned, he sometimes sold every copy in five minutes.
He may owe his survival to two factors: a residual respect for literature in his country, and the fact that he and Hoxha both came from Gjirokastër; in fact they came from the same street, the "Madmen's Street." "It was a strange coincidence," he says, "we were both writers; well, he thought he was a writer. For years we had the same translator." The uneasy cohabitation he established with the party in the 1970s, however, led to his being dubbed the "official dissident." During Hoxha's paranoid last years, he wrote more aggressively; the greatest novel of this period is The Palace of Dreams, a vision of control devoted to the collection and interpretation of every dream in the empire. His situation paradoxically became untenable with the emergence of the "democratic" faction in 1990, when both communists and democrats sought to use his reputation to their advantage. He had been smuggling his texts out of Albania to France during the 1980s; it was time to leave.
Kadare is not what we in the west mean by "contemporary": his use of old forms—parable, myth and fable—is at first disconcerting, but to read him is to have the sensation of watching a pendulum of history, of Balkan past and future, swing back and forth. The present is no more than a nanosecond, one way or another. There is, like Gjirokastër, the city of stone, something of stone about him. As a southern Albanian, his tone and style are grounded in the Epirote song tradition that some scholars claim as a pattern for the chorus of Greek tragedy. Even the most urban and political of his novels more closely resemble folk tales than anything else; one of his skills is to be able to turn an event into an archetype. He does this in his Three Elegies for Kosovo, the story of two rhapsodists Gjorg and Vladan, Albanian and Serb respectively, who sing the glory of their princes as they fight to defeat the Turkish sultan Murat at the 14th-century battle of Kosovo. Bound by fate, they hurl their antagonism at each other in identical songs. Three Elegies reconnects the Balkans to ancient Greece and to medieval Europe.
The battle for any writer released from tyranny is the same: to regain their subject. Kadare spent a part of the 1990s interrogating his past, memorialising the path that had led to exile. Each time I went to Paris and teased him about having nothing to write about, he rebutted the suggestion impatiently. He was right: in 2000 he published Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, a slyly memorable and characteristically mythic novel of the upheavals of Albania's thaw. To say "mythic" implies not fey, but its opposite: to say that his books read as though they have been dreamt is to prettify a voice that speaks of rock and mountains, of love and vendetta and corpses and the hardest interrogations of history. It is a compelling, unremitting voice, original in the way of Kafka, Orwell or Saramago, and it seeks constantly, I think, to persuade us of two things: that the region we have long taken to be Europe's backyard constitutes one of its great storehouses of riches, and that nothing is to be valued higher than literature, because literature will lead us to the sanest sense of freedom. It is a voice that, like the smashed civilisation it comes from, deserves a wider hearing.
