As part of my Around the World in Books Reading Challenge, my pick for Albania was the Man Booker International Prize winning novel by Ismail Kadare.
The General of the Dead Army is a dark and depressing work of fiction. It chronicles the journey of an Italian general who goes to Albania with an important mission. He and a priest travel across Albania exhuming bodies of dead Italian soldiers who died fighting in Albania during WW 2. The reception to this endeavor is clearly hostile as they remind the locals of the occupying forces who destroyed their country twenty years ago. Our narrator is this Italian general and it is through him we see the remains of a country struggling post-war, it’s harsh history and it’s colorless landscape. Like the general, we also get bogged down with the arduous and futile task of digging remains and tagging bodies. This novel makes for a grim reading is not for everyone!
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