Ismail Kadare

At the heart of the Sultan's vast empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams. Inside, the dreams of every citizen are collected, sorted and interpreted in order to identify the 'master-dreams' that will provide the clues to the Empire's destiny and that of its Monarch. An entire nation's consciousness is thus meticulously laid bare and at the mercy of its government... The Palace of Dreams is Kadare's macabre vision of tyranny and oppression, and was banned upon publication in Albania in 1981.

When the construction of a bridge built to link the Balkans to Europe is repeatedly and mysteriously sabotaged, an old ballad starts making the rounds at local taverns. The bards sing of a legend – a woman immured in a castle wall to prevent it from falling. Some say the bridge is being damaged by local ferrymen, others blame the vengeful water spirits. But this is a town where terror and superstition reign and a solution must be reached. So it is decreed: a willing person must be plastered into the bridge…

"In a small town at the foot of the northern highlands, life appears to go on as it always has, but people are in a state of shock. The robbery of a local bank is seen as a sign of modern times and of westernization in this backward Balkan land. At the same moment, the harsh blood-for-blood law of the mountain folk, the fearsome Kanun, like everything else forbidden under the fifty years of Communist rule, is emerging from hibernation.". "Other strange things occur. Mysterious events that are two thousand years, two centuries, or even 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 recurring every few hundred years that is as much a part of the modern as of the ancient world.". "In a desolate spot on the outskirts of the town, some people search for the entrance to a tunnel that is said to lead to the secret archives of the State. They're looking for evidence of their own crimes - or of hypothetical crimes they might have committed. People say that the ghostly likenesses of Hoxha, Brezhnev, Ulbricht, Thorez - and even Oedipus - have been seen lurking there."--BOOK JACKET.

Tout commence par des disparitions, des déplacements d'objets. Shimura-san vit seul dans une maison silencieuse qui fait face aux chantiers navals de Nagasaki. C'est un homme ordinaire, qui rejoint chaque matin la station météorologique de la ville en maudissant le chant des cigales, déjeune seul et rentre tôt dans une retraite qui n'a pas d'odeur, sauf celle de l'ordre et de la mesure. Depuis quelque temps déjà, il répertorie scrupuleusement les niveaux et les quantités de nourriture stockée dans chaque placard de sa cuisine. Dans ce monde contre lequel l'imprévu ne pouvait rien, un bouleversement s'est produit. Devant l'écran de son ordinateur et grâce à sa caméra, Shimura-san finit par apercevoir l'intruse. Il y a bien quelqu'un chez lui. Il a vu son profil. Il l'observe. Il attend d'être sûr. Est-ce une hallucination, un fantôme de ses échecs sentimentaux passés, une amante amère et revancharde ? Il finit par appeler la police. L'invitée est embarquée et mise en cellule.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare’s first novel. Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is dispatched to Albania to recover his country’s dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission and their conversations bring out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing.

A venture into the strange (to us) world of the Albanian mountains, where the iron dictates of the "kanun", or blood feud, wrench apart the lives and peace of generation after generation. Although the protagonist is Gjorg, a young mountain man who, as of the first page of the novel, knows that by fulfilling the dictates of the kanun he will guarantee that his own life will end in one month, Kadare offers in addition a brutal portrait of the inhumanity of the Intellectual, in the person of Bessian...an academic to whom the blood and suffering of the peasants is the stuff of mythic and heroic beauty.

It's the 1970s and cracks are starting to appear in the alliance between China and its Communist cohort Albania. When an Albanian steps on the foot of a Chinese diplomat the tension cranks up – couriers between Tirana and Beijing carry annotated x-rays of the foot back and forth. The Chinese intend to punish their interfering little ally discreetly. But is the Sino-Albanian axis about to come adrift? This is Kadare’s surreal black comedy about the inner sanctums of political power and the mysterious causal chains that transform ordinary lives.

When the new Egyptian Pharaoh decrees that he does not want a pyramid built in his honour his advisers are aghast. It is their firm belief that peace and prosperity only make the people more difficult to control – they must be kept under the whip. So the Pharaoh agrees to the construction of a pyramid colossal beyond imagining, an edifice that crushes dozens of people as each block is added and which inexorably drains the lifeblood from the country. As Egypt builds its monument to death, its neighbours plot and gloat…

In the mid 1930s, two young Irish-American scholars voyage to the Albanian highlands with an early model of a marvelous invention, the tape recorder, in hand. Their mission? To discover how Homer could have composed works as brilliant and as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey without ever writing them down. The answer, they think, can be found only in Albania, the last remaining natural habitat of the oral epic. But immediately on their arrival the scholars' seemingly arcane research puts them at the center of ethnic strife in the Balkans. Mistaken for foreign spies, they are placed under the surveillance of a nearsighted informer with a prodigious gift for reproducing conversations he has overheard. He is soon generating a stream of floridly written reports about the visitors' puzzling activities. News of their presence in the provincial town of N-- sets gossip to flying, and while the town's governor speculates on their imminent capture, his pretty wife, from her bath, plots her delivery from a marital ennui worthy of Madame Bovary. Research and intrigue proceed apace, but it isn't until a fierce-eyed monk from the Serbian side of the mountains makes his appearance that the scholars glimpse the full political import of their search for the key to the Homeric question.

In 1958, Kadare was selected to pursue his writing and literary studies as a graduate student in Moscow at the prestigious Gorky Institute for World Literature. Twilight of the Eastern Gods is Kadare’s fictionalized re-creation of his time spent at this “factory of the intellect,” a place created to produce a new generation of poets, novelists, and playwrights, all adhering to the state-sanctioned “socialist realist” aesthetic. During his time at the Gorky Institute, a kind of miniature Soviet Union where writers from deepest Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus all came to study, Kadare was caught up in the furor over Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize win, when the Soviet Union demanded that Pasternak refuse the foreign, bourgeois award or be sentenced to exile. Kadare’s time at the Institute, the drunken nights, corrupt professors, and enforced aesthetics are fictionalized in a novel that entwines Russian and Albanian myth with Soviet history. Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city and a story of youth, disenchantment, and the incredible importance of the written word.

Aparecida por vez primera en Tirana en 1970, CRÓNICA DE PIEDRA supuso un importante giro en la trayectoria novelística de Ismaíl Kadaré, convirtiéndose en foco del que habrían de irradiar personajes, procedimientos y proyectos narrativos. En esta obra, una de las pocas autobiográficas del autor, desfilan los años de la infancia durante la invasión italiana y alemana, la resistencia guerrillera y la vida en ese ambiente, pero también sus primeras lecturas y obsesiones, la conformación de su imaginación y de su mirada, núcleo de toda su obra posterior. La presente edición ha sido minuciosamente revisada por Ramón Sánchez Lizarralde, autor de la traducción, de acuerdo con la edición definitiva de su obra que acometió el autor, libre ya de trabas, a partir de que obtuviera asilo político en Francia en 1990.

Set against the tumultuous backdrop and aftermath of the war in the Balkans, 'The Accident' intimately documents an affair between two people caught in each other's webs. The investigation into their deaths uncovers a mutually destructive obsession that mirrors the conflicts of the region.

The brother that has been dead for years brought his sister home from a faraway land.

originally published 2008.