THE DOLL

The Albanian novelist/poet and perpetual Nobel candidate considers his complex relationship with his mother.

This brief, brittle autofiction novella by Kadare intimately explores the ways his mother influenced both his personality and art. It’s not exactly a loving tribute: She was a difficult and idiosyncratic woman, well-off where his father’s side of the family was poor, uncomfortable in a home that is “eating me up,” and at odds with her in-laws. Her stiffness, combined with her taste in white makeup, earned her the nickname of the book’s title. But Kadare also sees in her emotional austerity a wellspring of artistic inspiration: “Everything that had harmed the Doll in life became useful to me in my art,” he writes. Among those things was a healthy skepticism, as Kadare’s success as a writer ran up against a Communist regime in Albania that seized his manuscripts. But just as he conquers those issues and his reputation improves, his mother develops peculiar ideas about his work. Does success mean he’ll have to disown her? She inexplicably suggests he marry a “semi-prostitute” and asks if his going to France makes him a Frenchman. His father is disengaged from this peculiar behavior, more interested in news reports Kadare can share from beyond the Iron Curtain. Is this a portrait of mental illness, failed parenting, totalitarian oppression, or something else? Kadare describes these incidents in prose so bare-bones that they almost defy any particular emotional resonance, which makes it hard to get a grip on the story either as “auto” or “fiction.” What lingers is an almost abstract feeling of mournfulness about birth and death, “the darkness from which we all emerge. Or the other one, the darkness to which we are all going.”

A slight, slippery, mordant elegy for an emotionally distant mother.