SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of The Concert, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 69, no. 2 (spring 1995): 412.

In the following review, Elsie explores the speculation surrounding Kadare's political metaphors in The Concert.

So much has changed in Albania in the six years since the original Albanian publication of The Concert (Tiranë, 1988) that the Sino-Albanian alliance now seems like ancient history. Albania was hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world during most of that extraordinarily curious marriage, which lasted from the break with the Soviet Union in 1961 through to 1978. The Concert, now finally in an English translation, is Ismail Kadare's literary digestion of a tumultuous era he lived through at first hand, and survived.

Much political speculation has since been attached to The Concert, which is Kadare's longest novel to date. Was the author's satiric treatment of Red China in permanent revolution and of upper party circles in Beijing...