A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare review – learning to live with the dead

Melodrama, tragedy and myth illuminate the relationship between individual and state in a fine novel from the Albanian writer

‘I have tried,” remarked Ismail Kadare in a 1998 Paris Review interview, “to make a sort of synthesis of the grand tragedy and the grotesque.” In this, for better and for worse, he has succeeded. Kadare is a writer who excels in the cataloguing of human errors and horrors, in a style and in forms that one might rightly describe as synthesised. Born in Albania, and having lived in Paris for many years, he is one of those rare writers of international reputation who has managed to avoid the pitfalls and indulgences of bland, postmodern, transcultural “world literature” and whose work remains truly peculiar, local and challenging. This does not necessarily make for easy reading. A Girl in Exile is a book about a gone girl – but it is no Gone Girl.

Kadare has been writing difficult and troubling fiction for many years now: his first novel was published in Albania in 1963. Slowly, gradually, translations into French and into English have brought him to an ever wider audience. In 2005 he won the inaugural International Man Booker prize. Last year he was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem prize. He is often touted as a potential recipient of the Nobel prize. The books – and I am judging them largely on the basis of translations, and translations of translations, usually from French from the original Albanian – are strange and fluid in form, yet obsessive and repetitive in their concerns.

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