Description

By (author) Kadare Ismail; Introduction by Smiley David; Translated by Coltman Derek

Short /annotation:
Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched 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 brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task.

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Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched 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 brings 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.

‘
He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare”s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil’ Independent on Sunday

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He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare”s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil

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A novelist of dazzling mastery

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Astonishing…his finest work

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With its metonymic realism and fidelity to its characters, The General of the Dead Army reminds us why his work is so valued

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Literary gold dust – haunting, bleakly comedic and ultimately horrific

Biographical note:
Ismail Kadare (1936–2024) is Albania”s best-known novelist and poet. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than forty countries. He was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019 and the Neustadt Prize in 2020.

Promotional headline:
Albania: once a battlefield, now a charnel-house. And yet, life goes on …This sweeping epic of post-war Albania was Kadare”s first novel.