“Mothers are the hardest creatures to understand”, the poet Andrei Voznesensky tells the narrator, Ismail, near the beginning of Ismail Kadare’s The Doll. Ismail is a writer who, like Kadare, grew up in Communist Albania after the Second World War, and he agrees with Voznesensky’s assessment. The solution is to write of his mother as the doll she appeared to him to be in his earliest memories – fragile, restrained, frozen: “a kind of draft mother or an outline sketch which she could not step beyond”. He remembers her, that is, as a creature who needs him to write her into existence.

The “doll”, whose name we never know, is married in 1933 at seventeen to Ismail’s father, the only son of a powerful family in Gjirokastër. The marriage is an alliance between clans, and the doll knows she is an offering binding a poor family to a rich one. Gjirokastër is a city of stone houses with their own prisons, where the doll is inspected at a “maiden dinner” by ladies peering at her through antique lorgnettes. Smajl, as the doll calls him, wants to believe his mother’s marriage was a love story, but he knows this is a story he tells himself, because telling stories is what Smajl does. After the war he begins his career as a writer, but to the doll this is a threat. “She had heard that boys, when they become famous swapped their mothers.” Smajl may laugh at this, reading his Freud. But the doll knows she will be replaced, in the writer’s family romance, with the mother her son needs her to have been. It is from “her doll-like breast” that he sucks the cold distance that makes him a writer: “I almost started to believe that she had accepted her own self-impairment in order to be useful to me”.

And so she remains a doll – thin, insubstantial, lifeless – even as she moves to Tirana and Ismail spends time at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, the finishing school of Soviet literary ideology. In returning to the site of Twilight of the Eastern Gods, published in instalments in the 1960s and 70s, with its mixture of autobiography and fiction, Kadare provides a useful reminder that little of the contemporary vogue for autofiction is really all that new, and that the narcissism that apparently drives it cannot easily be...