SOURCE: Kadare, Ismail, and Shusha Guppy. “Ismail Kadare: The Art of Fiction CLIII.” Paris Review 40, no. 147 (summer 1998): 195-217.

In the following interview, Kadare discusses his body of work, his literary influences, his time in the Soviet Union, and his creative process.

In 1970 a novel by an unknown Albanian writer took literary Paris by storm. The General of the Dead Army was the story of an Italian general who goes back to Albania after the Second World War to find the bodies of the Italian soldiers killed there and take them back to Italy for burial. It was hailed as a masterpiece, and its author was invited to France, where he was welcomed by French intellectuals as an original and powerful voice from behind the Iron Curtain. The General was translated into a dozen languages and inspired two films: one under the same title starring Michel Piccoli, the other...