The Successor

by Ismail Kadare
Arcade, 216 pp., $24

Reviewed by Stephen Schwartz
The Weekly Standard
January 23, 2006

http://www.islamicpluralism.org/403/the-successor

Excerpt:

The Successor
by Ismail Kadare
Arcade, 216 pp., $24

ISMAIL KADARE IS THE ONLY Albanian intellectual well known outside the lands where that language is spoken. The Successor, originally published in 2003, is his most recent novel rendered in English. The word "translation" does not really apply here because David Bellos, a Princeton professor of French, does not know Albanian, and reworked this version, and his earlier such efforts with Kadare's writings, from French editions.

Kadare's novels fall into two categories. Volumes like Doruntine, published here in 1990, The Three-Arched Bridge (1997), Broken April (1998), and Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2002) revive ancient Balkan legends. They sometimes center on a woeful but enduring tradition, the blood feud, which remains a serious problem in northern Albania.