A Girl in Exile’, by Ismail Kadare

A compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and white-hot fury.

Review by John Banville

Kafka had to rummage about in the shadowier corners of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire to gather material for the hyper-real unreal world in which his fictions are set. His apartment buildings, busy as anthills, his crepuscular offices, his bedrooms and courtrooms, are immediately identifiable as the milieu of the petite bourgeoisie of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — he was as much of a realist as his revered Flaubert — only made, as he said himself, a little bit unheimlich (uncanny) by consciously and carefully manipulated distortions and omissions. The world was not Kafkaesque until Kafka made it so.

Unlike Kafka, to whom he has often been compared, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare found himself in a nightmare world ready-made, although even Kafka would have considered the surreality of postwar Albania somewhat improbable. And while Kafka chafed under the oppression of office life and kept tugging at the chain that held him at his desk, Kadare was, for a time at least, a bona fide component of the apparatus of state, having been a member of the Albanian parliament from 1970 to 1982, under the Alice in Wonderland rule of the communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Kadare, who was born to Muslim parents in 1936 in the Albanian town of Gjirokastër, is one of the few eastern European writers who survived intact the grotesqueries of postwar communism — which, of course, in countries such as Albania and Romania was merely a cover for ultranationalist thuggery and corruption. His latest novel to be translated into English, A Girl in Exile, is dedicated to “the young Albanian women who were born, grew up and spent their youth in internal exile”.

The central character — he is hardly a hero — is Rudian Stefa, an Albanian playwright, and his story is set somewhere between the 1980s, when Hoxha’s ghastly regime was in full control, and the close of the millennium, when jubilant crowds are hauling the toppled statues of tyrants through the streets. The story begins with Rudian in trouble, although he is not sure what the trouble is, or why he is in it.

There are two possible reasons why he has been summoned, without explanation, to appear before the Party Committee: his new play, the opening of which is being held up by the censors, or his young girlfriend Migena, with whom he has had a bad fight — bad enough that, at the height of it, he hit her, although he has only a vague memory of doing so — and whom, in his anger, he accused of being a spy. In Hoxha’s Albania, hitting a girl was one thing, but suggesting she was an agent of the state was quite another.

When he arrives at Party Committee headquarters, however, he is questioned about another girl, Linda B., who committed suicide, and who had in her possession a book of his which he had dedicated to her. Again, a girl killing herself is of no consequence to the authorities, but this girl was part of a family sentenced to internal exile, for the crime, it appears, of having been middle-class.

The town to which the family was banished — for five-year terms, repeatedly extended — was one of those squalid hellholes in which communist regimes specialised, and Linda B., feeling her life draining away, longed for the bright lights of Tirana. In particular she fixed on the famous Rudian as embodying all the excitement and glamour of the urban intellectual world. Although she never met him, and saw him only a few times on television, she developed a consuming passion for him.

‘A Girl in Exile’ is a compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury

It was her former school friend, and Rudian’s mistress, Migena, who got Rudian to dedicate to Linda the book that was to become her most precious possession, her talisman and, in a way, her passport to a kind of freedom. When she realised that Migena also had fallen in love with Rudian, and was having an affair with him, she accepted the fact, because even though she was jealous, she saw it as a direct contact with her beloved: Migena’s lips had touched his, his hands had caressed her breasts …

The novel is littered with casual references to the everyday horrors of life under totalitarianism. A café is mentioned by name, “as it had been known before the ideological campaign against cafés”; Rudian’s play, which has a ghost in it, may be held up because “socialist realism didn’t allow ghosts”; Rudian at one point is surprised to hear that Migena has been interrogated but not harmed, since “In Albania investigators’ offices had blood on the floor”.

However, the most harrowing instance of the unbearable nature of life in internal exile is that Linda underwent a breast-check, in the hope that she might have cancer, which would mean she would at last get to Tirana, since that was where she would have been sent for treatment. A Girl in Exile is a compelling amalgam of realism, dreaminess and elegiac, white-hot fury. Kadare communicates with awful immediacy the nature of tyranny and the accommodations that those subject to it must make — as Kadare himself had to do. After reading it, one feels like giving four cheers for poor old battered democracy.

A Girl in Exile, by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson, Harvill Secker, RRP£16.99, 192 pages.

John Banville is author of ‘The Blue Guitar’ (Viking)

Illustration by Dan Mitchell.

Financial Times, MARCH 11, 2016