Ismail 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.'
... Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel can be read as an elegant, slightly bittersweet coming-of-age memoir, touched with nostalgia for a homeplace that is now long lost ... The Doll is full of compelling details of life in a changing Albania, as the citizenry come to terms with various hues of communist rule under Soviet-backed Enver Hoxha. One of the funniest accounts is of the day, in 1953, when condoms arrive for the first time in the pharmacy ... The Doll is rich with such touches, alongside many of Kadare’s familiar concerns – with the folkloric roots of modern life, say, or the absurdity of Albanian politics. However, the poignant observation, bitter irony and misspoken fear running through the narrator’s central relationship with his mother, a woman secretly terrified of being disowned as unworthy the moment her son achieves the fame he so desires, are what dominate this fascinating study of a difficult love.
Some of the greatest novelists write with a forensic honesty about history and their countries. Ismail Kadare is one of them ... In 2015, at 78, he published The Doll in Albanian, turning that questing skill to a fraught set of subjects: his family home and his mother. The Doll, now published in John Hodgson’s English translation, is a short but intense autobiographical novel. In just 176 pages, with concentrated brilliance Kadare — who received the first International Man Booker Prize in 2005 — fictionalises his youth and his mother’s life ... This is not a book that a newcomer to Kadare should read first but, in its weaving of family history, Albania’s turmoil, and the life of a writer shaped by women’s words and anguishes, it is an essential work. The Doll is mesmerising, and like Kadare’s family home, conceals both darkness and flashes of light in its interior. Perhaps no one ever fully unravels the puzzle of their own pasts, their parents’ lives, but Kadare takes us through a secret entrance as far as he, and we, can bear to go into those hidden chambers.
In a properly ordered world, Ismail Kadare would by now have got the Nobel prize for literature. By any reckoning, he is one of the most important living European writers, a man whose work is as compelling as any novelist to have emerged from the vanished world that was the Communist bloc ... His latest work is about his mother and wouldn’t be the first book you’d give to someone to introduce Kadare. It’s not one of his almost dreamlike symbolic novels to do with the Ottoman incursion into Europe, such as The Three-Arched Bridge, or his invocations of Albanian Communism — it’s entirely personal. But because it’s such a simple story, a son’s account of his mother, it has the engaging qualities of tenderness and immediacy ... This is an account of the evolution of a writer — Kadare is funny about his schooldays and interesting about his time at the writers’ institute in Moscow — but it’s the haunting, fragile figure of the doll that stays with you. She has the last laugh.
Ismail Kadare is a lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern from the rockily intractable mysteries of his native Albania ... Having portrayed Albania’s body politic over many books as a sort of dysfunctional household, Kadare, now 84, reverses the flow of the metaphor. The Doll is an autobiographical story, with Kadare’s beloved, fragile and inscrutable mother at its heart ... The dependence of Kadare’s tough, sly and resilient voice on his mother’s lifelong loneliness and vulnerability lays a clinching and moving capstone on this book. At the end, on a return visit to the renovated mansion, he and his wife Helena discover a ‘secret entrance’ to the house. The Doll delicately opens some secret doors of its own. But ‘the perplexity of long ago’ remains.
Kadare’s wistful, introspective family portrait (after A Girl in Exile) combines fiction and memoir as he recollects his childhood in Gjirokastra, Albania, and early writing career in Tirana while imagining his mother’s early life ... Kadare offers illuminating reminiscences of his literary development, describing the temptation of forbidden western literature under communist rule and his habit of writing ad campaigns for his books before they were finished ('The century’s most demonic novel' was his pitch for the first novel he began writing in a notebook). Kadare’s rich portrayal of his mother dovetails neatly with that of communist Albania, full of conflicts and incongruities. Kadare’s fans will relish this slim, enigmatic snapshot of the author’s origins.
This brief, brittle autofiction novella by Kadare intimately explores the ways his mother influenced both his personality and art ... Is this a portrait of mental illness, failed parenting, totalitarian oppression, or something else? Kadare describes these incidents in prose so bare-bones that they almost defy any particular emotional resonance, which makes it hard to get a grip on the story either as 'auto' or 'fiction.' What lingers is an almost abstract feeling of mournfulness about birth and death, 'the darkness from which we all emerge. Or the other one, the darkness to which we are all going.' A slight, slippery, mordant elegy for an emotionally distant mother.
