SOURCE: Brownjohn, Alan. “Kingdom of Bones.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5093 (10 November 2000): 24.

In the following review, Brownjohn regards The General of the Dead Army as a “profoundly moving novel” and notes that the narrative remains engaging, despite the ambiguousness of the lead characters.

The Albanian novelist, poet and critic Ismail Kadare both enjoyed the cautious favour of the Hoxha regime as someone applauding the Marxist “modernization” of his country, and suffered from its humiliating disapproval; he was banned from publishing for three years, when he brought out a political satire in verse in 1975, and then attacked in 1981, when he “evaded politics” in one of his lighter fictions. Since 1990, he has been living in France. This, his first (and still most celebrated) novel, originally published here in 1971, returns to us now in the author's definitive final version of 1998, and by the same indirect route. With no literary translator from the...