The Accident by Ismail Kadare

Fine review of Ismail Kadare’s latest, The Accident, by Sam Munson in The National.

It has been seven years since one of Kadare’s books last appeared in English; now we get The Accident, issued by Canongate in an able translation by John Hodgson. In its structure and thematic concerns the novel is closely connected to its predecessors, though it superficially resembles a spy thriller. Set in the years following the end of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, The Accident purports to tell the story of a nameless researcher and archivist tasked with investigating a mysterious car accident in Vienna. The crash killed Besfort Y., a Serbian diplomat, and Rovena St., his lover, an Albanian student. Their deaths, despite being accidental, are judged by various intelligence agencies to have cryptic political overtones. The investigation passes through the hands of the police, intelligence operatives, and extra-governmental organisations before coming to the attention of the aforementioned researcher, who begins to scrutinise the joint history of the victims with intelligence, reserve, and a growing suspicion that there is more to the incident than is immediately apparent.

As he delves more deeply, the forces at play become murkier; by the novel’s end, Kadare has done a great deal to undermine the notion that even the most basic phenomena possess a sure and certain objective existence. . . .

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