Written in 1985, the first of these three stories was smuggled from Albania to France a few pages at a time. The communists would not like it. The narrator’s girlfriend, Suzana, dumps him at the behest of her high-up Politburo daddy, “she would have to make changes to her way of life, to her wardrobe, to the people she saw. Otherwise she might harm his career”.

The narrator, a Tirana TV journalist, compares this to Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia to gain a fair wind for Troy. Watching the May Day parade and spotting Suzana in the grandstand, he recalls the last round of purges. Television bosses were sent down the mines or quietly bumped off for ignoring “the masses”, ie a viewer’s letter of complaint. Then the army and industry were dealt with on similarly idiotic pretexts, leading to “lines of coffins”.

The narrator says, “Suzana’s sacrifice would certainly have consequences even bleaker than those horrors . . . Should untold thousands of cancelled evenings out count for less than heaps of corpses?” You sort of see what he means, the “impoverishment of ordinary life” under tyranny, but after the chilling account of the purge it seems out of kilter. And as for the central image . . . “Beneath her pubic hair I could see the pale pink lips of her sex . . . I compared it to what my previous girlfriend’s looked like. Her organ could have been called imposing and baroque . . . But Suzana was only a beginner.” Eh?

At the end, he reflects on the May Day slogans, “learning, productive labour and military training . . . And what would become of the dark delta of a woman’s sex? A parched, desiccated estuary dotted about with puny blades of yellowing desert grass”. Right . . . Moving on . . .

In The Blinding Order, an Ottoman sultan decrees everyone with the evil eye must be blinded. Young Marie, engaged to a civil servant in the blinding office, tries on some knickers from her trousseau. “Under the silk, the lips of her vulva were half revealed . . . she had heard that women’s sex organs were as different as their faces . . . Marie was sure hers was beautiful”. (Is it just me or is this a rather reductive view of femininity?) The blinding campaign goes on, and meanwhile – blimey. “She sat on the carpet with legs half-crossed, and studied her sexual organ . . . She could not take her eyes off the slightly curved line separating the pink lips of her vulva . . . ‘Unbelievable,’ she said inwardly.” There is more on these lines. Is it too early for a drink?

The Great Wall dates from 1993, after Ismail Kadare’s move to Paris. The noted Chinese landmark is seen by a nomad’s ghost as symbolising the barrier between life and death, with death a kind of exile. You keep thinking that the author will mention the Yangtze delta and get on to his pet subject, but he doesn’t. And, for all their foibles, the stories have a certain carved-ivory quality about them.

AGAMEMNON’S DAUGHTER by Ismail Kadare, translated by David Bellos
Canongate £12.99 pp226
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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