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May 30, 2011
"Among Eastern European writers, Ismail Kadare has a reputation for writing books of an especially dark nature. As an Albanian, the veteran novelist has been witness to both his own nation’s agony under the wonky totalitarianism of Enver Hoxha, and the crisis that enveloped the Balkans in the 1990s. Out of such life experiences are dark preoccupations naturally made. The Accident, Kadare’s 17th book to be translated into English, is a formidable puzzle. An Albanian couple living in Vienna are killed when their taxi overturns. The driver survives, but can explain only that the crash occurred after he glanced in his rear-view mirror. What he saw upset him so much he lost control of the wheel. How The Accident is told, a kind of slow reveal mixed with a purposeful ambiguity, does the most justice to his concerns. The structure of the book, in effect, is its meaning, a nifty literary dissolve between content and form." Charles Foran Globe and Mail