Description
Book Synopsis1958. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author, Boris Pasternak, faces exile, the press hound him and demand that he refuse the award. A few days earlier the young writer found a copy of this book - could those simple pages really be so dangerous?
Based on Ismail Kadare''s own experience, Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a portrait of a city, a story of youthful disenchantment and a reminder of the incredible importance of the written word.
Trade ReviewIsmail Kadare is this generation's Kafka * * Independent * *
Compelling . . .absorbing . . .deeply personal . . . With a new transation of
Twilight of the Eastern Gods, Ismail Kadare is finally receiving the recognition he deserves * * New Statesman * *
Kadare writes . . . with a light of touch and with consummate literary skill. This is the work of a strange and mysterious master * * Sunday Business Post * *
One of the most compelling novelists now writing in any language * * Wall Street Journal * *
Enigmatic and beguiling . . . pockmarked with brilliance * * The National * *
Fascinating . . .
Twilight of the Eastern Gods is reflective of a culture of paranoia and suspicion, in which anyone who made a wrong move or uttered anything that might be deemed subversive could expect reprisals * * Herald * *
One of the world's greatest living writers -- Simon Sebag Montefiore
Like Coetzee's
Youth . . . For its poetry, its pastiche and its tonic bitterness, this is a book that was worth redeeming . . . It smacks gorgeously of the bitchiness that pervaded Soviet literature * * The Times * *
Skilfully mixes the personal and the political . . . [Kadare is] a forceful example of how to function as a writer under communism * * Independent * *
His fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny . . . great writer, by any nation's standards * * Financial Times * *
There are very few writers alive today with the depth, power and resonance of this remarkable novelist * * Herald * *
One of the most important voices in literature today * * Metro * *
Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness * * Los Angeles Times * *
Frequently hilarious . . . Puts me in mind of Roberto Bolaño's
The Savage Detectives locked in a freezer, or a version of Adelle Waldman's
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. set in a Brooklyn where it was always snowing, all the young writers in the city lived in the same building, everyone regularly consumed debilitating quantities of vodka and each was suspected of being a government informer . . . I intend to keep laying an annual £20 bet of Mr. Kadare [to win The Nobel Prize for Literature] for as long as he lives * * New York Times * *
Highly atmospheric * * Times Literary Supplement * *
The personal, against a political backdrop, is drawn out slowly and mesmerisngly * * Glasgow Sunday Herald * *
Kadare's sexual desire shines brightly against the dull torpor of the cold war * * Guardian * *
