Tag Archives | communism

“Too Loud a Solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal

4 July 2011 · Reading · Comments { 9 }

The narrator of this book is an idiot. His boss despises him, others laugh at him. He drinks beer all day, and works in a cellar compacting wastepaper. He has been compacting wastepaper in the same cellar with the same hydraulic press for 35 years, and has picked out classics of world literature from the [...]

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Ismail Kadare and dissent

16 March 2009 · Literary events · Comments { 1 }

Interesting piece in The Guardian recently about the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and his alleged ties to the Hoxha regime. I went to see Ismail Kadare speak at the Southbank Centre in London last year, and he addressed this issue very effectively, I thought. He said that the people who tell him he should have [...]

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