History and Memory in Ismail Kadare’s Fiction
Ismail Kadare was often compared with many important writers of the Western canon, from Franz Kafka or Hermann Hesse to Elias Canetti from the point of view of his capacity to establish a parabolic dimension of his fiction. Besides, his ability of expressing the complex relationship established between the human being and a political regime that ignores the profound realities of mankind made Kadare one of the most outstanding representatives of a specific type of narrative, closely connected to the contemporary problems that preoccupy nowadays literature. Nevertheless, his great accomplishment consists in his great talent to analyze the Balkan region and all its tensions (interethnic, social and cultural) from a personal point of view. Kadare’s novels and short stories underline, besides, a mythical pattern and this Albanian writer’s fiction was sometimes interpreted as an original expression of a some kind of „Eastern Babel obsession”, as the literary critics used to say. The Palace of Dreams, The Three-Arched Bridge or Chronicle in Stone, some of his most accomplished writings, express also the author’s preoccupation for the inner mechanism of memory and its relationship to history. His fiction becomes, thus, more than a simple chronology of facts, turning into a lucid meditation regarding the implication of time passing and its consequences over any human society.
Keywords: contemporary novel, history, memory, symbolic fiction, parabolic writing, allegory.
