'THE MONSTER' OF ISMAIL KADARE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Journal: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Year: 2019

Ismail Kadare’s ‘The Monster’ was perhaps his most ill-fated work during the socialist period, a doubly-heretic novel of modernist experimentation and political allegory. Published in 1965, it was immediately criticized and banned. After the fall of communism Kadare was able to revise freely and publish it in its definitive form. The aim of this paper is to interpret the nature of the extensive changes made to this final version and to offer a new reading of it. After summing up the principal in