SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of The General of the Dead Army, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 65, no. 4 (autumn 1991): 746-47.

In the following review, Elsie praises Kadare's revolutionary narrative in The General of the Dead Army, maintaining that the novel “marked the birth of contemporary Albanian prose.”

“Like a proud and solitary bird, you will fly over those silent and tragic mountains in order to wrest our poor young men from their jagged, rocky grip.” Such was the vision of the Italian general in the company of a laconic priest on his mission to Albania to recuperate the remains of his soldiers who had fallen some twenty years earlier. He began his duties with a sense of grandeur befitting his rank: “In the task he was now undertaking there was something of the majesty of the Greeks and the Trojans, of the solemnity of Homeric funeral rites.” The...