Book of the Week: A DICTATOR CALLS by Ismail Kadare
Award-winning Albanian writer Ismail Kadare unpicks a three-minute conversation in thirteen views in his latest novel, A Dictator Calls. Here history, memoir, fiction, and myth merge to analyse a short and tense telephone conversation between Joseph Stalin and Boris Pasternak. Within these factual and imagined viewpoints Kadare probes the relationship between art and autocracy — how to write under a dictatorship — with verve and wit.
“An inquiry concerning power, artistic integrity, fame, memory and more. A Dictator Calls is slim, but its themes are not — the riddles of this novel are still ringing in my mind. “ —Sunday Telegraph