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Introduction: Ismail Kadare's The General of the Dead Army
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18520 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1991 |
390 Words |
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When Ismail Kadare first published The General of the Dead Army in 1963, he was already an accomplished poet and a rising star in Albania's closely monitored literary establishment. His talent was evident to the Albanian critics, and yet, right from the start, it was clear that this novel was somewhat out of step with other novelistic exemplars of the then-prevalent school of socialist realism. Although the action takes place in and around Tirana in the early sixties, nowhere is the government or the Communist Party of Albania mentioned; nor are there any political slogans or symbols of the official ideology. That may partly explain why the novel became the first of several of Kadare's works to win critical acclaim outside of Albania and was a best-seller in France, where it was praised by L'Express as "not just a revelation of Albanian literature but a revelation in any terms." Only a few of Kadare's novels have been translated into English, but all of those that have--Chronicle in Stone, Doruntine, and Broken April--received high praise. First published in English in a small edition in 1972, The General of the Dead Army is now available again and is excerpted in the following pages.
In the excerpt the narrator soberly records the thoughts and feelings of an Italian general who comes to Albania twenty years after the fierce battle with partisans during World War II. Accomplished by his chaplain and a team of local laborers, he sets about the grim task of exhuming thousands of soldiers' corpses for reburial in Italy. The general's tragedy is that, despite his best efforts, no gesture by him can glorify, or change in any way, the crimes and cowardice of the past. Nor can the Albanian peasants, for the their part, escape the onus of their historical resentment. Kadare pursues in memorable prose a theme he would explore in many
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