Broken April

Ismail Kadare was born in the city of Gjirokastër during the brief period of time after the fall of the Ottoman Empire when Albania was a monarchy, although soon after, Italy invaded, and Albania eventually became a communist country. Kadare’s parents, a post office employee and a homemaker, were both Muslim, although Kadare later came to identify as an atheist. Kadare enjoyed reading Shakespeare at an early age. He traveled and began building a literary reputation in Russia before coming home to Albania in 1960, when Albania broke ties with the U.S.S.R. Kadare worked as a journalist and also wrote poetry and short stories. In 1963, he published his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. Although Kadare writes in Albanian and remains one of the most popular authors in the country, his work started to gain an international reputation in the 1970s and 1980s (with Broken April published in 1978), and his books continue to be translated into different languages. Kadare’s anti-totalitarian novel The Palace of Dreams caused tension between him and the Albanian government, and so since 1990 he has lived as a political exile in France, continuing to write and to receive acclaim for his work.

When Ismail Kadare was born, Albania was a monarchy, but for most of his life, it was a communist nation. The communist regime that governed Albania was particularly repressive, and Kadare had to contend for much of his career with the possibility of censorship—or worse—by the government. With Broken April, Kadare avoids making a direct challenge to the reigning Albanian government of the time by instead setting the events back when Albania was still a monarchy. Most of the Albanian customs that Kadare references in Broken April are based on real historical traditions, and some even survive into the present day. Hospitality, for example, which gets taken to extremes in the novel, has long been an important part of Albanian culture, and it continues to be a part of the national identity today. The concepts of blood feuds guided by a code of ethics called the Kanun, of truces called bessas, and of tower dwellings called kullas are all real parts of Albanian culture. Bessian, a fictional well-known writer who lives in the city of Tirana but writes about the more remote High Plains region, shares some superficial characteristics with Kadare himself, who also lived in the Albanian capital of Tirana at the time when he wrote the novel.

Ismail Kadare’s works have been compared to several other authors, with Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis) being perhaps the most frequent comparison. Like Kafka, Kadare has a spare style, a dark sense of humor, and an interest in the theme of power, particularly in bureaucracies and repressive governments. Kadare’s work also receives comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), two writers who also wrote extensively about the history of their home countries and who at times faced opposition from the government because of what they wrote. For much of the time when Kadare lived in Albania, the dominant literary style was called Socialist Realism. This style involved presenting idealized versions of revolutionary communist values. Although Kadare met with several prominent figures in the Socialist Realist movement, his work is in many ways a reaction against it, instead presenting a darker and more critical view of life in Albania. Kadare’s work is part of a long tradition of Albanian literature, which was mostly unknown outside the country until Kadare himself started to achieve international prominence. Kadare looked to inspiration from Albanian literary figures who predated the communist era he lived in, with one notable example being Faik Konica, whose work as an editor and critic helped to define Albanian literary culture in the early years after the country’s independence from the Ottoman Empire.