The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare – review

In 1943, Italy, having signed the act of capitulation to Germany, withdraws from the Albanian territory which it has occupied since 1939 and German troops enter the country under the guise of liberators. Their first stop is the ancient stone city of Gjirokastër. Among the citizens there are two doctors who carry the same name, Gurameto: the heftier one is called Big Dr Gurameto, the other Little Dr Gurameto. To everyone's surprise, the Nazi commander, Fritz von Schwabe, recognises in Big Dr Gurameto an old friend from their university days.

Von Schwabe has changed – he is, of course, older, scarred by fighting – but Big Dr Gurameto acknowledges his former comrade and invites him to dine at his house. However, the Albanian resistance, which long fought the Italian invader, now turns its efforts against the German one, and snipers start shooting German motorcyclists. As a reprisal, 100 Gjirokastër citizens are taken hostage.

Nevertheless, the dinner still takes place in Big Dr Gurameto's house and somehow, during the conversation with his old friend, the doctor manages to convince him to spare the hostages, including a Jewish pharmacist. The next day, the Germans leave the city. Though there has never been any rivalry between the two Gurametos, Big Dr Gurameto is now hailed as a hero for having saved the city, while Little Dr Gurameto is scorned.

After the war, the newly instituted communist regime accuses Big Dr Gurameto of collaborating with the Nazis, and both doctors, linked in the authorities' mind by their common name, are arrested and tortured. Big Dr Gurameto realises that the man they take to be his colleague is someone else. And among the proofs of his alleged treachery is the fact that the man he invited to dinner 10 years earlier could not have been Commander von Schwabe, who was killed on the front a few months earlier. Who then are these presences, these impostors?

In The Fall of the Stone City, first published in 2008 and now brilliantly translated by John Hodgson, Ismail Kadare's subject, as always, is the presence of the past. In Kadare's Albania, a country that has suffered under consecutive dictatorships – the Ottoman empire, Italian fascism, German nazism, communism – the dead and the living share the everyday stage on which official lies and private pretence build up a setting of deceit and incredulity in which nothing is as it seems. Against the backdrop of the unreal city, a maze of stone with its back to the wolf-haunted mountains, overlooking gentle Greek-minority settlements along the river, rumours and plots, betrayals and threats, old tales and new occurrences cast a doubt on everything that might be called history. It is said that the girls from the neighbouring villages are kidnapped and taken to Gjirokastër, or perhaps they drifted there of their own free will. "No one knew what went on inside. Were they wretched there or happy? Perhaps their dream of becoming ladies had come true. Or perhaps they themselves had been only a dream, and nothing else."

We are accustomed to historical fiction that pretends to be factual: poetic licences are contritely confessed in an afterword and critics are keen to point out anachronisms or impossibilities. Kadare has never been interested in archaeological fidelity. In his admirable and vast literature (more than 20 novels to his name), mythology and history are equally competent to bear witness, except that the former is better at illuminating facts than the latter at reporting them. Kadare's contemporaries are not only the victims and victimisers of his sad century, but also the men and women who fought on the plain of Troy and in the legendary places of the Albanian epics. In his books, there is no facile comparison between past and present, but a profound understanding of our common tragedies, of their constancy, fluidity and pathos.

In telling the story of The Fall of the Stone City, Kadare has perhaps taken as his model the terrible last scene of Don Juan, the dinner that the hero offers the dead Comendador. But what is hubris in the Spanish tragedy is humility here: the resigned acceptance of past ghosts who will not disappear or find rest. As the novel unfolds, the borders between the material and the dream worlds blur even further, the characters and features blend, fact and fiction merge into each other until finally, on the last page, though "there was no evidence anywhere to show what really occurred at the most ineffable moment of Big Dr Gurameto's life", the reader is offered a revelation (which should not be betrayed in a review) more astonishing and truthful than any mere documentary chronicle.