SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Albanian Revenge.” Christian Science Monitor 82, no. 230 (24 October 1990): 14.

In the following review, Rubin commends Kadare's lyrical prose in Broken April, asserting that the author “achieves a precise and delicate balance of wonder and horror, simplicity and irony.”

A small, mountainous country on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, Albania was always one of the lesser-known places on the European subcontinent: a preserve of fierce mountain tribesmen whose exotic garb inspired Lord Byron to pose for a portrait in Albanian dress.

Modern Albania is still one of the last places on earth that Americans are not allowed to visit. Isolated from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc ever since the Khruschev era, when it aligned itself with the People's Republic of China, Albania went its own way under the dictatorship of its long-time president, the late Enver Hoxha, who in 1967 ordered all its churches and mosques...