INTERVIEW / THE FAMOUS WRITER: BUT I DO NOT LEAVE PARIS Kadare returns for good “It is my personal choice”

Arjan Çani Ismail Kadare decides to return permanently to Albania “But I can never abandon Paris” He has not avoided this blow to the head either. He was ready for it, just as he was ready for the passion, not so understanding, which has by no means faded even today, except that it comes and settles down as the country and the world move “a little” further on. His philosophy of time and of his own writings sounds more or less like that music player, once so liked in Tirana, with the rain sounding in bass notes. Hënefera. His apartment in the center of Paris, very particularly silent and calm, leads one to believe that there a man of extreme culture would have put down roots forever. He has published books in Albanian, he has also published books in French, but this latest decision to have his home increasingly often in Tirana speaks of a move of real weight. We asked the greatest writer of Albanian literature, Ismail Kadare, what is happening to him, whether this decision counts as an act of mistrust toward the West, and whether one can speak this way of the writer’s “departure” at the end of the 1980s. When was he to return to Tirana? If he had begun work on the novel in light and shadow? Were the articles and polemics troubling him? The insults against Ismail? Our answers... Continues on page 24

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