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An old teacher of mine had a portrait of Stalin hanging in his kitchen.
(Most of my decorations are historical maps.)
Hoxha ruled Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985.
Hoxha never made much impact on American consciousness.
State murder, political imprisonment, and internal exile were common practices under Hoxha.
Ive never visited the country.
(A friend of mine tells me its a great place to spot rare birds.)
All along I read Kadare novels.
These days Albanians are making inroads in international pop charts and winning prizes at art fairs.
The prime minister, Edi Rama, is an artist himself.
But there hasnt been another literary breakthrough.
Some of Kadares critics blame him for sucking up all the oxygen.
We await the Knausgaard and the Ferrante of the Albanians.
But he never became a full-on dissident.Doing so probably would have meant execution.
He saw his books banned and experienced internal exile, but he also served as a minister of parliament.
A lack of purity in opposition to Hoxha may be one reason Stockholm has never honored Kadare.
Its set in the early 1980s, sometime between the Iran hostage crisis and Hoxhas death.
Its governing myth is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, perhaps the ultimate ghost story.
Kadares case that his homeland is intimate with the wellsprings of the great works of Western literature is convincing.
It will be interesting to see what his inheritors make of their countrys belated encounter with the present.
