Between Exile and Asylum

An amalgam of utopia and despair iswhat characterizes An Eastern Epistolary, the work that the bookkeepers all toooften mistakenly place on the shelf of political literature. This is in fact a novel,in the sense Shklovsky and the Russian formalists saw it, bringing togetherfiction and a document… A whole that offers a surprising image of newerhistory, a kind of epopee of paradox. Jean-BaptisteMichel: Le Nouvel Observateur An Eastern Epistolary fits into thetradition of epistolary novel… Some day thisbreviary will be read as a modern replica of DonQuixote. Jean-MichelPalmier: Le Monde Diplomatique This book is at the same time a humaneand literary testimony, in itself it conciliatesthe daring defense of freedom and deep cosmopolitan emotion,which knows nothing of national separation. ClaudioMagris: Corriere della Sera The question of what literary genrethis work belongs to is completely irrelevant. What is important is that thisis true literature. IsmailKadaré: Fnac-Etoile, Pariz