The latest addition to my website is Dritëro Agolli‘s Komisari Memo (The Bronze Bust). It is nice to know that Ismail Kadare is not the only Albanian novelist translated into English. While this book is not of the same calibre as Kadare, it is still a well-told tale, about Albanian partisans in World War II, fighting the Germans and Albanian nationalists (in cahoots with the Germans). The main focus is on the eponymous (in the Albanian title) Commissar Memo, a communist hero. We know he has died from the beginning, as a group of people are hauling a bronze bust of him up a hill. We follow his career as he tries to change the political views of the locals, antagonises the nationalists, gets shot in the leg (badly), hides out in a town occupied by the Germans and then joins a partisan group fighting the Germans and nationalists. He is certainly the standard communist hero, though not without faults. Not a great work but a good read.