The Doll

In this autobiographical novel, Albania’s most renowned novelist and poet Ismail Kadare explores his relationship with his mother in a delicately wrought tale of home, family, creative aspirations, and personal and political freedom.  

Young Ismail's world centres around his mother. Naïve and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's imposing house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon. Yet despite her youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas. Most of all, she fears that her intellectual, radical son will exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer. This is a disarming story of home and creative ambition, of personal and political freedom. Rooted in the author's own childhood in Albania, it is dedicated to the memory of 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... 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."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. Since the appearance of The General of the Dead Army in 1965, Kadare has published scores of stories and novels that make up a panorama of Albanian history linked by constant medi