‘An ancient shadow permeates his work’: Alberto Manguel

The anthologist pays tribute to the late writer, reflecting on how Kadare’s use of the ancient past to make sense of the present renders him essential reading

Ismail Kadare, giant of Albanian literature, dies aged 88 A life in quotes: Ismail Kadare Ismail Kadare obituary

Every morning, for the past few decades, unless he was travelling in his native Albania, Ismail Kadare sat at the same table of Le Rostand cafe overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, and wrote. In the evening he watched the news on Albanian television, and in the morning his wife, Helena, would tell him the latest from Le Monde, but once he reached his table he was no longer in our century but in an ancient past that mirrored contemporary events in the stories of Greece and Rome.

He recalled having read the Greek classics when he was 11, “after which,” he said, “nothing else had any power over my spirit”. This ancient shadow permeated all of Kadare’s work. His plays, short stories, poetry and essays, above all his 36 novels, can be read as a denunciation of absolutist power in the form of retellings of some of our earliest myths. Every war, in Kadare’s reading, echoes the tragedy of Troy; every forced displacement, the plight of Odysseus.