Kadare responded to political criticism with haughty petulance, but as a distraction from more troubling aspects of his work it likely saved his reputation. That’s because the connecting thread of Kadare’s oeuvre is neither an opposition to totalitarianism nor, as his less generous critics have claimed, pro-regime toadyism, but rather a monomaniacal mission to rewrite Albanian history by erasing the legacy of five centuries of Ottoman rule and fabricating cultural continuity with Greek an...
