RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIsmail Kadare, the prolific Albanian novelist, is best known as an ironist who has earned comparisons to George Orwell and Milan Kundera, writing in the face of the ruthless Communist dictator Enver Hoxha ... [Kadare] returned to his country only several years later, after receiving a call from his siblings informing him of the illness of his mother, whom he called the Doll. Such is the premise of Kadare’s autobiographical novel of the same title, originally published in Albanian in 2015 and now translated by John Hodgson into English ... Readers already familiar with Kadare’s writing will most likely find this delicate work of remembrance rewarding ... Kadare likens his project to a Russian poem in which the poet repeats the Russian word for \'mother,\' mat, three times, and on the fourth repetition leaves the word unfinished: matmatmatma. The final syllable — tma — means \'darkness.\' \'An endless cycle of matma, \"motherdarkness,\"\' Kadare writes, \'in which both the mother and the darkness remain beyond understanding.\'
Kaouther Adimi
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe writing loses direction at times; characters appear who were never introduced, along with details that are unnecessary and uninteresting. Yet the truly potent effect of the book is that by taking on literary history from the underbelly of the French nation — from the colony just across the sea — Adimi confronts us with episodes that are simply never spoken of in France: the grand celebration of the end of World War II, in May 1945, which, in Algeria, turned into a massacre by the colonial administration; another massacre, this time in Paris, in 1961, of Algerian protesters, who were thrown into the Seine by French police officers ... It is in unhappy nations, we are meant to understand, that history is a relentless companion.
