SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of Broken April, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 65, no. 2 (spring 1991): 343-44.

In the following review, Elsie commends Kadare's contribution to contemporary Albanian letters with Broken April.

When the writer Bessian Vorpsi announced the destination of his honeymoon to friends and acquaintances at a dinner party in Tirana, he was met by a stunned silence. His young bride Diana was taken aback as well at the thought of spending a holiday on a desolate plateau of the northern Albanian Alps. Would not the sparkling beaches of the Albanian Riviera or Italy or even France have been more appropriate for protagonists of the upper middle class of prewar Albania's burgeoning little capital? Some friends could understand that Bessian, as a writer, was fascinated by the prospects of a journey by car into the past, among the feudal and feuding mountain tribes of the north, a...