SOURCE: Mundy, Toby. “Novel of the Week.” New Statesman 129, no. 4510 (30 October 2000): 55.

In the following review, Mundy lauds The General of the Dead Army as a powerful and evocative parable for Balkan politics.

In his famous essay “What Is a Nation?”, the French historian Ernest Renan suggested that nations are defined equally by what people choose collectively to remember and by what everyone decides to forget. The General of the Dead Army tells the story of an Italian general sent to Albania in the 1960s to repatriate the remains of the young Italians who fell there during the Second World War. Their defeat is something that Ismail Kadare's saturnine general would rather forget. Unfortunately for him, the bungled Italian invasion and the tireless and savage resistance it provoked are things that the Albanians will always remember.

The general approaches his irregular mission with solemnity. Prior to his departure for...