SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of L'envol du migrateur: Trois microromans, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 76, no. 2 (spring 2002): 242-43.

In the following review, Elsie praises the skillful French translation of the short stories collected in L'envol du migrateur.

One of the most surprising buildings in Albania is a wooden hunting lodge built in the marshlands of Lezha by Mussolini's foreign minister Count Ciano (1903-44). Ciano had intended it as a retreat, where the leaders of Fascist Italy could go bird-hunting in their newly acquired colony. It was used as a hotel complex during the Stalinist dictatorship and survives today with its modestly surrealist Visconti decor as a rather out-of-place structure standing in the middle of an otherwise barren landscape. It is to the history of this lodge and the itinerary of a crime committed in it that “Le Chevalier au Faucon” (“The Falcon Knight”) is devoted, the first...