Ismail KADARE ~ The General of the Dead Army

FIRST UK PRINTING. W. H. Allen, London: 1971

8vo., dark green publisher's boards, lettered in gilt to backstrip; together in the unclipped green and black printed dustwrapper (£2.00 net) featuring a design by Val Biro; THE BOOK a very good copy, boards ever-so-slightly splayed; a little pushing and sunning to the spine tips; a few light spots to the prelims and fore-edge but otherwise clean; the very good DUSTWRAPPER with overall light shelfwear and marking, darkened to folds; rubbed at edges; light nicking and a couple of short closed tears; evidence of dampsplashing, most so to the verso. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. Translated from the French by Derek Coltman. The Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Ismail Kadare was predominantly a literary critic until the publication of this, his first novel in 1963. Kadare lived in Albania during a time of strict communist censorship, and was forced to write under the guise of allegory, myth, satire and coded messages in order to outwit the regime which had already banned three of his previous works from publication. The plot here follows an Italian general who travels to Albania in order to repatriate the bodies of fallen soldiers. Along the way, he meets a German general also carrying out a similar task, and the book focuses on the futility of war, and the horror and guilt which accompanies the pair's thankless task. Largely ignored by Albanian literary critics because of the lack of focus on the communist government, the book has become somewhat of a classic, despite the author himself claiming that it was not his best work. The book was later translated into several languages, including Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish and French before finally appearing in English some eight years after the initial publication. Kadare finally escaped Albania in the 1990s by defecting to Paris, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times. In 2005, he was awarded the Man Booker Prize, and was praised by head judge Professor John Carey as "a universal writer in the tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer." Scarce in the Val Biro dustwrapper.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Very Good
JACKET: Very Good