“ He has been compared with Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare?s is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil "
“Kadare’s prose glimmers with the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez.”
“Kadare is a supreme fictional interpreter of the psychology and physiognomy of oppression....He is closer here to Swift than to Kafka: he cuts sharp and all ways.”
Kadare is a writer of subtlety and irony, capable of powerfully saying what he thinks without ever actually saying what he thinks.
Ismail Kadare's "The Palace of Dreams" is a book that reads like Kafka as influenced by the painter M.C. Escher with a bit of "1001 Arabian Nights" thrown in for good measure.
THE PALACE OF DREAMS is a first-rate tale, an unsettling horror story that mirrors modern life too closely for comfort. Ismail Kadare deserves a wider audience in the United States. His work in eminently readable, and he has much to tell us.
Although a short novel, it is packed with unsettling moments that remain with the reader, long after one finishes reading the book. Based on this novel alone, any reader can understand why Ismail Kadare is recommended for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
This is an engrossing story rendered in biting, easily flowing prose whose matter-of-factness amplifies the horrors of the events it describes. Reading THE PYRAMID will forever change the way you contemplate those monuments to one individual's power that ultimately only demonstrate the smallness and powerlessness of humans in the face of history.
This formidable novel is written in an unstoppable, passionate, fanatic flood of dashing prose.
A masterpiece.
