European avant-garde fiction at its worst

Maybe I've just read too many of these kinds of novels recently but it strikes me that Ismael Kadare's newest novel, "The Accident," is an example of European avantgardism at its worst - the ur-type being the Renoir film Hiroshima Mon Amour, and a thousand similar works to follow, basically two hours or 200 pages of two lovers talking endlessly and elliptically about their relationship, with occasional obscure allusions to world politics and occasional grandiose statement about life and the cosmos but with nothing moving anywhere. Yes, I'm being unfair to Kadare. Yes he has written some very strong books. Yes he bravely wrote subversive fiction while living under the incredibly oppressive Albanian regime. And yes The Accident starts off really well - that's why I gave it 100 or so pages before packing it in. The inevitable two lovers die in a taxi crash on their way from hotel to airport. Why? What happened? Were they assassinated. The driver, who survives, claims to have seen in his mirror that they tried to kiss just before the crash - what is the meaning of that? I have to say, nearly half-way through the book, I still have no idea. It's not that I expect Kadare to write a conventional novel, nor did I expect this to be a novel of international espionage. But, please, something about the characters that will interest me in either of them. Instead, they're vacant, absences on the page. I don't know what makes them live much less what made them die.