In memory of Ismail Kadare, the voice of Albania

Ismail Kadare, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and Albania’s most famous poet and novelist, casts his vote in Albania’s capital Tirana in 2005. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

I knew the famous Albanian writer and poet Ismail Kadare.

He died last week at the age of 88.

When I first met him, he wasn’t that famous. I didn’t know who he was.

Which was understandable from my point of view. Although he was famous in Albania, hardly anyone outside the small, isolated communist police state knew anything about him.

Only later did I learn that his novel “The General of the Dead Army”, published in Albania in the 1960s, would become a sensation and be translated into at least 40 languages.

It is about an Italian army general, tired of life, who is faced with the stressful task of traveling to Albania to exhume and bring back to Italy the remains of Italian soldiers who lost their lives in the brutal fighting of World War II.

Kadare later wrote a number of books, achieved international fame and won numerous awards, although – strangely – not the Nobel Prize for Literature.

We met in August 1986. At that time, I was the first American reporter in 40 years to be allowed into sealed-off communist Albania.

Enver Hoxha, the paranoid communist dictator who ruled the country since taking power after World War II, died in 1985. During his lifetime, he turned the country into a sealed armed camp like North Korea. No one could get in and no one could get out.

Since the possibility of a waiver existed, I applied for a visa as a reporter for the Boston Herald and was amazed that it was approved.

Maybe it had something to do with my parents emigrating from the country. I was born in Cambridge.

When I arrived at the small, shabby and deserted airport of Tirana on a small Swissair plane from Zurich, it was as if I had landed on the moon.

Although Hoxha was dead, the country was still an isolated Stalin-style totalitarian police state, where even private car ownership was banned to all but the ruling elite of the Communist Party.

The Sigurimi – the Albanian secret police – were everywhere and people were afraid to speak their minds, let alone talk to a foreigner like me.

Back then, there was no internet or email. Any contact with the rest of the world was forbidden. You couldn’t call or make phone calls.

It was hard to understand how such a beautiful country, with a magnificent Adriatic coast, spectacular pristine beaches and stunning mountains reminiscent of the Alps, could be such a depressing place. But it was.

One day, my companion, who was monitoring me, and I met Kadare on a beach in Saranda in the south, a beach accessible only to party members and well-connected people.

Kadare, a thin chain smoker, was a communist, like everyone else in Albania. But Kadare, I learned, was more of a communist for convenience. He had to be one in order to survive as a writer. He walked a fine line. He spoke French, but no English.

So, in mistranslation, Kadare was upset when my supervisor accidentally told him that I had never heard of him or read anything he had written. But he had never read anything I had written either. That’s the way it is.

Anyway, on the flight home I read an English translation of The General of the Dead Army and was deeply impressed. I still have the book. It was as good as anything Ernest Hemingway had written. I told Kadare about it. He liked it and we became friends.

After that I visited him in Tirana, where I returned often to work on a book about Albania. I ended up writing three.

It turned out that we had both been in Vietnam during the war in March 1967. He was with the North Vietnamese and wrote for the newspapers in Tirana and I was in South Vietnam and wrote for the Boston Herald. It’s a small world.

Kadare was accused of not helping to lead his country towards democracy after the turbulent fall of communism in 1990, as fellow writer and poet Vaclav Havel had done in neighboring Czechoslovakia. Instead, Kadare fled to Paris with his family. This probably saved his life, but cost him the Nobel Prize.

Kadare stressed that he had never been a politician, but only a writer.

And he was a really great one.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at [email protected]