June 1934, Stalin allegedly had a 3-minute phone call with novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam - what could they have said to each other…?

It was such an intriguing premise to imagine what could have been exchanged in the alleged phone call between Stalin and Pasternak, but thirteen versions of it were just too much. Yes, thirteen. The writing was so dry and with a lot of jumping around between different thoughts, resulting in quite a disparate novel that lacked flow. Yet it also felt repetitive - there’s only so much variation possible in a 3-minute conversation about a specific topic.

The novel also didn’t get off to a great start with a confusing and frankly self-indulgent self-insert by Kadare - the guy is clearly desperate to be awarded a Nobel Prize, but I rather doubt that this is the book that will get him there (I haven’t read any of his other work, so can’t comment on the rest of his œuvre).

It must be said that there were interesting tidbits around writing under tyranny and the fine line that writers and poets must walk between veiled criticism of an authoritarian regime and falling foul of it, but they were too sporadic to salvage the book for me.

An intriguing premise exploring writing under tyranny, but the execution was dry, repetitive and filled with disparate thoughts that just didn’t come together cohesively.