Eighth meeting of the seventh edition of the Reading Group "The Garden"
"The General of the Dead Army" by Ismail Kadaré.
Reading and commentary by Alessandro Franci
The work:
Twenty years after the end of World War II, a general and a chaplain colonel of the Italian Army are given the delicate and onerous task of finding the remains of our fallen soldiers in Albania. The solemnity of the mission soon shatters against the difficulties that arise from the dark alliance of a hostile climate, an impassable land that seems to want to hold the remains of the hated enemies, and the inexorable pride of a people for whom it seems that war is a condition of life. When the general is finally ready to bring back his "dead army," he realizes that he has exhumed, along with the poor remains, hostilities, grudges, suspicions, thus awakening the atavistic instincts of a people who "have always had a taste for killing and being killed." By evoking the horrors of the Albanian war, Ismail Kadaré constructs a novel of rare intensity, in which the primordial force of violence that weighs on the destiny of men and the madness of war that unites victors and vanquished in the same desolation emerge in all their rawness.
Author:
Ismail Kadaré was born in 1936 in Gjirokastra, southern Albania. A narrator, poet, and literary critic, he left his country in 1990, seeking political asylum in France. Since the fall of the communist regime in his country, he divides his time between Albania and Paris. He is considered one of the greatest European authors, several times nominated for the final selection for the Nobel Prize and is an honored member of the Accadémie Française. These are some of his books published in Italy: Il generale dell'armata morta (1963), I tamburi della pioggia (1970), La città di pietra(1971), Il ponte a tre archi(1978), Aprile spezzato (1980), Chi ha riportato Deruntina? (1980), The Palace of Dreams (1981), The Pyramid (1995), Agamemnon's Daughter (2007), The Eagle (2007), The Successor (2008), An Invitation to Too Much Dinner (2009), The Accident (2010), The Doll (2015), the short story collection Mornings at Café Rostand (2014).
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center