The Doll by Ismail Kadare: book review

The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother (2015) is set in the Kadare family home in Gjirokaster, southern Albania, from 1994 to 2013.

The Doll is the author’s mother, as fragile as a paper doll, who married into the Kadare family in 1933 as a 17-year-old. She died in 1994, and this is the author’s memoir with her as the centre of his world as he determinedly focuses on a writing career. He is married to Helena, so a small part of the story is about his wife and her relationship with Kadare’s parents.

There are two side stories: the Doll’s relationship to the marital house, and her relationship with her mother-in-law. The Doll also has to come to terms with her son’s rising fame in the literary world.

The house is critical to the author’s understanding his mother – its location, size, construction, and hidden rooms – even with a dungeon.

Females are the focus of this memoir. Specifically, the term ‘mother’ and its meaning in terms of the author’s blood ties and ties to his country: ‘my mother’ and ‘my motherland.’ Whereas his mother stayed in the same house in the same country, the author chose to leave his mother and to leave Albania. The author has been living in political asylum since 1990 in Paris, France.

Readers learn what his departure meant to his mother through the questions that she used to ask her son, and which he reflects upon after her death.

I’ve read many of Kadare’s novels – he is one of my favourite authors – and he does not disappoint in this poignant memoir. This novel is about rituals, trials, challenges, anxieties, dreams, home, hidden secrets, and above all, it is a love story. Beautifully, but strangely told.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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