SOURCE: Forster, Imogen. “Mao Goes to Pot.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 323 (7 October 1994): 49.

In the following review, Forster offers a mixed assessment of The Concert, asserting that “in among this baffling farrago of plot, counter-plot and inflated ‘message’ are passages of great delicacy and perceptiveness.”

Sometimes called Albania's “loyal dissident”, Ismail Kadare occupied a contradictory position under Enver Hoxha. A favoured intellectual, even a cultural spokesperson, he was at the same time a persistent, though harassed, critic of crude socialist realism and of a political order that, as an “official” writer, he was obliged to uphold. Less secure under the succeeding regime of Ramiz Alia, he left Albania for Paris in the dying days of communist rule. Though he has returned, he appears not to have played the public role that some observers predicted.

In The Concert, Kadare uses “Aesopian” language to make a crisis in recent Albanian...