The Doll by Ismail Kadare — a mesmerising autobiographical novel

Some of the greatest novelists write with a forensic honesty about history and their countries. Ismail Kadare is one of them: in The General of the Dead Army (1963) he sends his protagonist to Albania to find the bodies of Italian soldiers killed in the second world war; Three Elegies for Kosovo (1998) returns to the 14th-century Turkish invasion. In 2015, at 78, he published The Doll in Albanian, turning that questing skill to a fraught set of subjects: his family home and his mother.

The Doll, now published in John Hodgson’s English translation, is a short but intense autobiographical novel. In just 176 pages, with concentrated brilliance Kadare — who received the first International Man Booker Prize in 2005 — fictionalises his youth and his mother’s life in their forbidding family home in Gjirokastra, an Ottoman town in the south of the country.

In 1933, Albania is under the rule of King Zog I. Kadare’s mother arrives as a 17-year-old bride to face the scrutiny of her mother-in-law and other women of the household, who inspect the new entrant through their lorgnettes. She is, in his description, a delicate woman, with something fragile and papery about her, like a doll.

“From an early age,” he writes, “I felt that my mother was less like the mothers in the poems and more a kind of draft mother or an outline sketch which she could not step beyond. Even her white face had the frozen and inscrutable quality of a mask, especially when glazed with panstick as she had learned from Kiko Pinoja, the famous make-up artist of the brides of Gjirokastra.”

A long drawn-out domestic war between the Doll and Kadare’s grim grandmother is revealed in glimpses. The family home is as central a character as any person in the novel: old, unwelcoming, vast with “high windows, cupboards, porches, secret chambers, carved wooden ceilings and famous dungeons”.

Kadare writes about domestic life the way he writes about war: with precise recognition of the burden of status, duties and position on the combatants

To the young bride, the weight of all of the Kadare ancestors is as oppressing as the daily silent war that she must wage for control of the household. She tells her young son, “The house is eating me up!” In his imagination, the phrase, which we come to learn is common among the brides of Gjirokastra grappling with those grand, secret-filled homes, takes on a peculiar life, tormenting the child with visions of a home that might literally devour its inhabitants.

Kadare writes about domestic life the way he writes about war: with precise recognition of the burden of status, duties and position on the combatants. The Doll is not as fragile as she appears; in time, she gathers her own weapons around her, drawing sisters and servants into battle as both women lay claim to the contested territory of one’s son, the other’s husband. It seems a waste of time and energy, yet Kadare is mercilessly accurate about the price the family’s grand life demands, and extracts, from the women of the household.

Kadare becomes a writer with this silent war raging in the background. In his teens, he scribbles a few pages of a first novel but devotes almost as much space to writing wonderfully florid advertisements for his unfinished book: “The century’s most demonic novel, hurry to the Gutenberg bookshop, buy I. H. de Kadare’s magnificent posthumous novel . . . ” He has more success with his poems in the 1950s, publishing a collection and, miraculously in the eyes of his family, travelling by taxi to Tirana to meet his publisher.

History stays just beyond the windows of the great house; Hitler and the world war, the peace talks between Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, acknowledged but not fully admitted. Kadare writes about history the way we experience it, not in headlines but mixed in with everything else — in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death and his grandmother’s death, what they remember most clearly is the arrival of condoms in the city pharmacy. “After some hesitation by the party committee over whether communists should be advised to avoid the pharmacy and leave these bits of rubber to the increasingly depraved bourgeoisie, everything calmed down.”

Life overtakes the Kadares. They move to the capital Tirana, to a smaller but still devouring home; Kadare grows up, goes briefly to Moscow as a student, gets married, writes, writes, writes.

His father dies, and one day in 1990, the state declares Kadare as a traitor. His mother and a friend look on helplessly as the police raid his apartment in Tirana, confiscating manuscripts and a gun. The Doll bursts into sobs only later, once the raiders have gone.

Kadare returns again and again to the mystery of his mother, not fully able to grasp the slippery reality of her life, yet sensing an invisible thread, as if all that she could not say in her life seeped into his writing. The family’s departure from Gjirokastra and his grandmother’s death brings an end to the cold war between the women, but the uprooting to Tirana challenges and scatters them, rather than accomplishing peace. It will take an unexpected return to Gjirokastra on Kadare’s part years later, after the Doll’s death, to find some sort of closure, in a striking final passage that carries a disturbing echo of the beginning.

This is not a book that a newcomer to Kadare should read first but, in its weaving of family history, Albania’s turmoil, and the life of a writer shaped by women’s words and anguishes, it is an essential work. The Doll is mesmerising, and like Kadare’s family home, conceals both darkness and flashes of light in its interior.

Perhaps no one ever fully unravels the puzzle of their own pasts, their parents’ lives, but Kadare takes us through a secret entrance as far as he, and we, can bear to go into those hidden chambers.

The Doll , by Ismail Kadare, translated by John Hodgson, Harvill Secker, RRP£12.99, 176 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Cafe. Listen to Culture Call, the FT’s transatlantic culture podcast, which interviews people shifting culture in London and New York. Subscribe at ft.com/culture-call, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.