"Mother gave up freedom in her life, to give me all possible freedom as a human being"

The prestigious American "New York Times", has devoted an interesting article to the book "doll" by the writer Ismail Kadare, which after five years of publication was translated into English this year by John Hodgson. The article is as follows:

The compulsion to travel home, prompted by the death of a parent, is a subgenre of self-sympathy-driven memoir that is understandable, if not always sufficient to make for good literature.

The best in nature relies not only on dusty memories, but also on the pursuit of new information: a piece of memory, a piece of told history forced by an unexpected void that needs to be filled.

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian writer, is best known as a chronicler who has earned comparisons with George Orwell and Milan Kunderan, writing opposite the ruthless communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania from 1944 to 1985. By the early 1990s, though Hoxha was dead, Kadare had stirred up enough anger within the regime, and he would have to leave for Paris. He returned to his place after receiving a call from his brothers' sisters who informed him about the illness of his mother, whom he called Kukulla. Such is the premise of Kadare's autobiographical novel of the same title, originally published in Albanian in 2015 and now translated into English by John Hodgson.

This nickname (doll) contains a great deal of information about the narrator's mother, or his childhood perception of her, her fragility and what will "I was later struck by its resemblance to paper", he writes. There is a Kabuki-like mystery that the narrator Ismail finds etched on her face, "unmatched naivety" and "prolonged adolescence", all signs of a limited existence that he now realizes was locked into place when she married at 17 and moved into her husband's centuries-old home, to reside under the imperial rule of her mother-in-law.

Some of the nice parts of "doll" arise from Kadare's obvious excitement at his return to Gjirokastra, the enchanting city of his birth, and the revival of her war years, when Kukulla was young. The political geography in Europe was in flux, but the habits of his mother's life were still there and alive. The reader finds voyeuristic intrigue in the procession that accompanied her on her first post-marital visit to her father's house and in her mother-in-law's announcement that as a woman of a certain age, she would never leave the the house. A divisive pressure on Kukulla's worldview comes in the form of a cousin who chose to give up her marriage for a career in Hoxha's increasingly dark political nebula.

The novel also turns, in part, into a 'bildungsroman' (editor's note: a novel dealing with a person's formative years or spiritual education), as the narrator tries to tease out what it was about his birth mother's sensibilities "the writer's gift" inside him. Ismail becomes convinced that "everything that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art" and that his mother had surrendered her freedom in her life "to give me all the freedom possible as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find."

Readers already familiar with Kadare's writings will likely find this subtle work a useful reminder. Non-readers may struggle as the text tends to strike, with a feminist bent, though the narrator is less interested in politics than in moving from place to place, from character to character, imitating the model of the memoir itself. as he takes us through his university days in Moscow and his falling out with family habits. But he refuses to fill in the spaces in between. Kadare compares his project to a Russian poem about "mother", "mat" three times and the fourth time he leaves the word matmatmatma unfinished. The last syllable "-tma" means "darkness". "An endless cycle of matma, 'mother's darkness'", Kadare writes, "in which mother and darkness remain beyond understanding". /Albanian Diaspora/