The NY Times: Kadare was compared to Kafka and Orwell, alone marked the isolated homeland on the map of world literature

The American newspaper “The New York Times” has dedicated an article to Ismail Kadare, the great Albanian writer, who passed away today. “He was compared to Orwell and Kafka and walked the political tightrope with works critical of his totalitarian state,” this newspaper writes.

In the headline, the NY Times writes that the writer “whose novels brought the state of Albania to the world” has died.

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly put his isolated Balkan homeland on the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the totalitarian state, died Monday in Tirana, Albania . He was 88 years old.

His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, head of Onufri Publishing House, its editor and publisher in Albania, who said he suffered a cardiac arrest at his home and died at a hospital in Tirana, the Albanian capital.

In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr. Kadare wrote a number of books, including novels and poetry collections, short stories and essays.

He gained international fame in 1970 when his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, was translated into French. European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.

Mr. Kadare’s name was mentioned several times for the Nobel Prize, but the honor eluded him. In 2005, he received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the Booker International Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in literature. Finalists included such literary titans as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.

In presenting the prize, John Carey, a British critic and chairman of the panel, called Mr. Kadare “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”

Critics often compared Mr. Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others. During the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, then under the control of one of the most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators of the Eastern bloc, Enver Hoxha.

To escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prisons or labor camps, Mr. Kadare walked a tight political tightrope. He served for 12 years as a deputy in the People’s Assembly of Albania and was a member of the League of Writers of the regime. One of Mr. Kadare’s novels, “The Great Winter”, was a favorable portrait of the dictator.

Conversely, some of his best works, including The Palace of Dreams (1981), subversively attacked the dictatorship, circumventing censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend.

Mr. Kadare “is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression,” Richard Eder wrote in The New York Times in 2002.

Mr. Kadare is survived by his wife, Elena Kadare, also an author, and two daughters: Besiana Kadare, Ambassador of Albania to the United Nations, and Gresa Kadare.

All his works shared one strength, Charles McGrath wrote in The Times in 2010. Mr Kadare is “apparently incapable of writing a book that fails to be interesting”.

In 2005, after winning the Booker International Prize, Mr Kadare said: “The only possible act of resistance in a classical Stalinist regime was to write.”