Ismail Kadare is by far the most successful Albanian writer, living or dead. The majority of significant post-war Albanian literature is in the socialist realist mode, as in the stifled novels of Serjo Spasse. While common sense says that no artist can overhaul a country’s literature singlehandedly, Kadare has done so. From his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, in 1963, Kadare has taken as his artistic object the whole of Albanian society. He draws upon myth and classical topoi and religion—Albania was the first country to legally secularize, in 1912—while focusing lovingly, melancholically, on the human experience of totalitarianism.



Those dual investments, the human and the state, hang in paradoxical tension, and that paradox is the core of Kadare. Almost literally: Kadare was born in the city of Gjirokastër, the inspiration for 1971’s Chronicle in Stone, just up the road from longtime communist dictator Enver Hoxha. In A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B., his most recent novel to be translated into English, the totalitarian state fuses with death itself, complicating our understanding of what it means to mourn and remember.

The novel opens with investigators summoning a Tirana playwright, Rudian Stefa, to a meeting. The Albanian authorities dislike his works and he is worried. One of his plays is under review by the censors. He has also recently had an argument with his girlfriend—not his partner, who is away, but a young woman named Migena—in which he grabbed her by the hair and hit her head against his bookcase. Several books fell to the ground and he sees their covers staring up at him accusingly still. Is she an informant? Is that why he is here?

A GIRL IN EXILE: REQUIEM FOR LINDA B., by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson Counterpoint, 192 pp., $26.00

The structure of the novel is like a gigantic black circle: an eclipsed moon. Stefa is our protagonist but he does not know what is happening to him, or why. Little by little, light peeks out around its edges. The investigators ask what he knows about the girl. But they’re talking about different girls, it turns out: A young girl somewhere else in the country has committed suicide and written extensively about Stefa in her diary. She also owns a copy of his book, inscribed to her by name: for Linda B. Stefa knows no Linda B. but it turns out that Migena does. What does Migena know? And why will she only cry, not talk?

The politically inflected scenes in Stefa’s plays mirror the way Kadare writes his novels. The play under review with the authorities is considered potentially dangerous because it contains a ghost. Ghosts are not permitted by the regime because they are supernatural, and therefore not realist. Linda B., of course, is a ghost in this novel, and she is not permitted into the story because Kadare has not created a magical world. Nonetheless, the ghost persists in both Stefa’s play and in A Girl in Exile.