Ismail Kadare, who has died aged 88, was the best known Albanian writer of his own generation and all others, and one of the most remarkable European novelists of our age. He leaves a body of work as immense as Balzac’s Human Comedy, as unrelenting in its critique of dictatorship as Orwell’s, and as disturbing as that of Kafka.
Kadare’s 80-plus novels, stories, poetry collections and essays constitute a national monument, an invention as well as a reflection of what it means to be Albanian, an exploration of both the ugliness and the dignity of an ancient and oppressed nation. With him disappears Europe’s last indisputable national writer.
