Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
In the Palace of Nightmares
By Noel Malcolm
The Three-Arched Bridge
by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson
Arcade, 184 pp., $21.95
The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare once observed that every writer has two ages, two chronologies. First there is the author's biological age; then there is his or her reputation, which is born at a different date and lives on another timescale. Kadare himself was born in 1936. His international reputation came into the world in 1970, with the French translation of his first major novel, The General of the Dead Army. From the late 1970s it grew rapidly, under the loving care of a new French foster parent, the Parisian publishing house of Fayard; by its mid-teens, Ismail Kadare's reputation was strong enough to support frequent calls—as yet unheeded—for the award of a Nobel Prize. Today he is possibly the best-known of all living novelists from the former Communist bloc apart from Solzhenitsyn, and certainly the only well-known writer from his native land.
Review, 4893 words
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