SOURCE: Binding, Paul. “Soul Searches.” New Statesman and Society 6, no. 241 (26 February 1993): 40-1.

In the following review, Binding labels The Palace of Dreams as a “Kafkaesque” narrative and notes the novel's poignant emotional resonance.

In of the most remarkable books of the past decade, Theodore Zeldin's lateral journey through the human mind, Happiness, we read that: “It was time that fantasies and dreams were recognised to be as important a part of history as coins and pots and battle-axes; dreams which never quite came true were as much events … as well-established facts, which frequently only just managed to happen.”

In the greatest living Albanian writer's most recently translated book [The Palace of Dreams], we are confronted with a society—the Ottoman Empire at an unspecified but late point in its history—that makes just this recognition. Dreams are the expressions of secret instinctive knowledge: studied with their “day's residue...