A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare - book review: Chilling tale of political tyranny in Hoxha's Albania

Translated by John Hodgson, Kadare's depiction of the terrible reach of the authoritarian state is executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness.

A Girl in Exile, first published in Albanian in 2009 and now translated into English, is, like much of Ismail Kadare's work, concerned with the nature of political tyranny. Set in Tirana, Albania (Kadare's country of birth) in what appears to be the 1980s under the rule of Enver Hoxha, it tells the story of a playwright, Rudian Stefa, his young girlfriend, Migena, and a young woman named Linda B, who has been banished to an obscure and miserable town for a succession of five-year terms that the authorities keep renewing.

Rudian, on opening, is making his way to a meeting with an official body – though the reason for the summons is obscure. Perhaps, he thinks, it is because of his relationship with Migena, whom he recently accused of being a spy during an argument; or maybe it is because of his latest play, which has attracted the attention of the state censors. Only after allowing him to address each of these possibilities in their presence does the Committee begin to question him about Linda B, a recent suicide whose possessions have been found to include a book of Rudian's that he has inscribed to her.

Rudian has no recollection of meeting Linda, but as the novel develops, he becomes captivated by the story behind her banishment and suicide, and disturbed by the possibility that he might be culpable for her fate. As he attempts to piece together the fragments of her narrative, he discovers that the obscure town to which she was consigned robbed her of the feeling of being free and alive, and instilled in her a longing for the intellectual and artistic stimulation that seemed to be promised by Tirana.

Kadare's evocation of the internal exile, the emotional and intellectual poverty, that Linda is made to endure is powerful, empathetic, at times harrowing and his depiction of the terrible reach of the authoritarian state is executed with an elegant combination of horror, absurdity, indignation, and other-worldliness. This is a society – a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – in which there exists “an ideological campaign against cafés”; in which there is a “ban on religion” and imprisonment, if not death, “for the least criticism of Stalin” in their nostalgic admiration for him, and which the state applies even to the dead.

Kadare has a weakness for cliché that divests his characters of particularity and which means the book can lack resonance. But at its best it is a chilling, humane and strangely beautiful work that will leave you with a lingering sense of discomfort.

Harvill Secker £16.99. Order for £13.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030