From the Reviews:
"Nothing "happens" in this fable, which comes to resemble Kurosawa's Rashomon as it approaches its denouement, but we are gripped every step of the way. It also recalls Kafka: in the brisk and hallucinatory narrative tone, and in the pervasive obsession with reading the signs -- does a twitch of the Guide's eyebrow indicate a change in political line? But the excellence of this book lies in the uniqueness of Kadare's vision, and in his ability to reflect pulsating human reality in the grip of an invincibly dehumanising force." - Michael Church,
The Independent
"(A) magnificent addition to his menacing, lyrical, darkly funny oeuvre. (...) (T)he prose never panics. It muses and meanders; the focus does not so much shift as glide from character to character. As a result, the reader feels a progressive tightening around the chest: you want to get out, you almost want to scream." - Murrough O'Brien,
Independent on Sunday
"The book, then, is a sort of existential whodunit, a cross between Dostoyevsky and Georges Simenon at his most bleakly enigmatic." - John Banville,
The Nation
"Kadare's political whodunnit sheds light not just on the 20th century -- on Hoxha, Stalin, Hitler, Bokassa, Amin, Pinochet -- but on every age. The nation portrayed is not just Albania (.....) There is certainly nothing run-of-the-mill about Kadare's biting parable of tyranny." - Julian Evans,
New Stateman
"His most recent book, The Successor, also happens to be one of his best. " - Christian Caryl,
The New York Review of Books
"It is a story uncannily suited to the nightmare universe the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has created over so many years that it is almost as if his writing had made it happen. Mr. Kadare carries mystery past itself into a morass where the whys and whoms become irrelevant, and time runs sporadically backward as well as forward." - Richard Eder,
The New York Times
"While public conjecture gathers and dissipates and returns in different shapes, Kadare gives us the intimate interior monologues of his characters. (...) This novel finds its truth in the imagined words of a dead man, setting the individual over the many. It valorizes the imagination by arguing that the truth of a man is not always found in what he does or says but in his numinous interior, the place all great literature celebrates." - Lorraine Adams,
The New York Times Book Review
"Using eyewitness reports, among them Bashkim Shehu's, Kadare brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of shadowy fear, rumours and recrimination in Albania during the early Eighties, when Nexhmije Hoxha appeared to be running the troubled Balkan outpost singlehandedly. (...) The Successor provides a mesmerically readable parable about the abuse of state power. (...) Though David Bellos's translation is occasionally marred by cliches ('...), the novel succeeds admirably." - Ian Thomson,
The Observer
"(I)t combines all the readability of a crime novel with the innovatory adventurousness of a work created by a writer who, even in his late sixties, never repeats others, much less himself. (...) My only dissatisfaction is with the translation. I know no Albanian but I cannot help feeling that something is amiss." - Francis King,
The Spectator
"All this is skilfully fitted into the format of a whodunnit. (...) The Agatha Christie business risks becoming wearisome through repetition, but Kadare develops ingenious variations on the theme. (...) This is not a novel of character, but we learn just enough about the cast to keep the narrative going and our sympathies fully engaged. (...) Above all, Kadare creates a haunting sense of the absurd." - Tom Deveson,
The Sunday Times
"As a tale of the totalitarian, in which citizens fear to confess their thoughts even to their spouses, this is resoundingly 20th-century stuff. (...) Amusing chinks of political satire shine through this dysfunctional Hades." - David Isaacson,
The Telegraph
"In fact the novel itself has precisely this quality of an ancient epic, with its startling imagery, its spare and beautiful language and the paradoxical power of Kadare's narrative to offer consolation, even when describing human pride and folly at its most bleakly destructive." - Jane Shilling,
The Telegraph
"Kadares engagement with the Shehu story results in a crisp reflection on the nature of state terror; on the emotional background to political crimes; and on how fear eats the soul. (...) Kadare is a great author so it sad that, 15 years after the fall of communism in Albania, his work is still translated into English via French and not directly from Albanian. This results in some awkwardness and offers further evidence of the decline in interest among British publishers in embracing foreign literature. Had Kadare not won the International Booker then this strange, enlightening novel would have been denied us." - Misha Glenny,
The Times
"Kadare's latest novel represents his most straightforward attempt to grapple with the crimes hidden in the fog of Hoxha's regime. The path it takes, though, is hardly unkinked." - Ben Ehrenreich,
Voice Literary Supplement
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/kadarei/success.htm
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