August 3, 2020
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 calls his mother “the Doll” because she is light as paper; everything about her, in fact, is light: her clothes, her speech, and her sighs. As a 17-year-old bride in 1933, having come from a family lacking in rich history (the groom’s great grandfather was immortalized in a song) though better off than the Kadares, the Doll hates her new husband’s centuries-old family house with its dungeon, secret passages, and forbidden recesses. A palpable chill develops between her and another resident of the house, the Doll’s mother-in-law. After the dowager dies in 1953, teenage Ismail moves with his parents to an apartment in Tirana. When Ismail gains attention for his poetry, his mother worries that he will neglect her. Later, she tries to get him to marry a woman she meets, and he resists. 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.
September 1, 2020
The Albanian novelist/poet and perpetual Nobel candidate considers his complex relationship with his mother. This brief, brittle autofiction novella by Kadare intimately explores the ways his mother influenced both his personality and art. It's not exactly a loving tribute: She was a difficult and idiosyncratic woman, well-off where his father's side of the family was poor, uncomfortable in a home that is "eating me up," and at odds with her in-laws. Her stiffness, combined with her taste in white makeup, earned her the nickname of the book's title. But Kadare also sees in her emotional austerity a wellspring of artistic inspiration: "Everything that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art," he writes. Among those things was a healthy skepticism, as Kadare's success as a writer ran up against a Communist regime in Albania that seized his manuscripts. But just as he conquers those issues and his reputation improves, his mother develops peculiar ideas about his work. Does success mean he'll have to disown her? She inexplicably suggests he marry a "semi-prostitute" and asks if his going to France makes him a Frenchman. His father is disengaged from this peculiar behavior, more interested in news reports Kadare can share from beyond the Iron Curtain. 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.
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October 1, 2020
Winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, Albanian novelist/poet Kadare opens this autofiction with a description of his mother as a paper doll, and throughout the novel, this gentle, remote woman is called the Doll. But as Kadare points out, from her arrival at the ominous Kadare house and household to marry his father, he must often imagine what she saw and felt, and he reveals the novelist's craft in a narrative that expands into cultural history and finally memoir. The tension between the Doll and her formidable mother-in-law permeates his childhood, with his father sitting in judgment between the two women instead of siding with his mother, as tradition would dictate. Later, Kadare outlines his intellectual growth and shows how it set him apart from his mother, though he finally realizes, "She surrendered the freedom and authority of a mother--in short, turned herself into a doll--to give me all possible liberty as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find." VERDICT What starts out modestly gathers strength, lending perception to a particular time and place and to Kadare as a writer. For literary readers.
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