The General of the Dead Army () is a 1963 novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It is the author's most critically acclaimed novel. Kadare was encouraged to write the book by Drago Siliqi, literary critic and director of the state-owned publishing house Naim Frashëri. It was first published when the writer was 26 years old. Plot In the early 1960s, nearly 20 years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general, accompanied by a priest who is also an Italian army colonel, is sent to Albania to locate and collect the remains of his countrymen who had died during the war and return them for burial in Italy. As they organise digs and disinterment, they wonder at the scale of their task. The general talks to the priest about the futility of war and the meaninglessness of the enterprise. As they go deeper into the Albanian countryside they find they are being followed by another general who is looking for the bodies of German soldiers killed in World War II. Like his Italian counterpart, the German struggles with a thankless job looking for remains to take back home for burial, and questions the value of such gestures of national face value. Reception The novel was initially criticized by Albanian official literary critics and then ignored as if it did not exist. Reason for that was that Kadare had avoided the realist socialist style while the Communist Party had also been intentionally ignored. Kadare's novel was in stark contrast to other writers of that time who glorified the communist revolution. Apart from that, while the poets and novelists of that time used to write about the ideological sun that warmed all communists, in this novel, Kadare, as in his other novels, removed neither the clouds nor the rain from the Albanian countryside. The novel has received many positive reviews. Richard Eder of The New York Times stated that "Kadare advances wryly and dryly into the darkness... [he] doesn't do messages; he brings them to lethal life". The Boston Globe called it "a powerful and poignant Albanian novel". Alan Brownjohn of The Times Literary Supplement praised the novel, calling it "a profoundly moving novel... rich in poignant details". It was listed on [[Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century|Le Monde'''s 100 Books of the Century]]. Though it is his best-known novel, Kadare views it as good as