This is a sort of very grim farce, or so I thought at first, but by the end it was just very grim. The humour fell off when the main character started being tortured, and don't get your hopes up for a happy ending. That being said, there's a very appealing sort of unreality going on here - the book's set in an Albanian city at the time of the WW2, and subsequently in the time of Stalin. It's not a fairy tale, but there are aspects of the book that could be interpreted as being influenced by fairy tales. Which is a useless description in itself, but the potential for doppelgangers, and for the dead turning up as dinner guests, are seeded through the text, albeit with subtlety and great restraint. It all tangles together in a mix of interrogation and multiple remembrances, all of which take place in a setting characterised first by war, and then by the kind of seeping, amorphous institutional instability that you'd find in Kafka... and because of this, when what initially appears as comedy turns to tragedy, there's really no adequate explanation or justification for any of it.

It's weird and interesting, anyway. I've never read anything by Kadare before. Unfortunately, I think this is the only book of his the library has here. I'll have to keep an eye out though, because I'd like to read more from him.