SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of Përbindëshi, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (spring 1992): 384.

In the following review, Elsie compliments Kadare's insightful political metaphors in Përbindëshi, noting that the novel was “an unusual publication for the Albanian literature of socialist realism of the sixties.”

Ismail Kadare, the scion of a small nation in which reality has often been difficult to stomach, has shown a long-standing predilection for impregnating his own reality with haunting legendry. The novel Kus e solli Doruntinën? (1980; Eng. Doruntine, 1988; see WLT 61:2, p. 332) transposes the Albanian legend of little Constantine and his sister Doruntine into a medieval whodunit. Ura me tri harqe (The Three-Arched Bridge; 1978), of which an English translation will soon be on the market, focuses on the much grimmer Balkan tale of immurement.

Përbindëshi (The Monster) is Kadare's most recent flirt with legendry and, at the same...