When political allegory is also good literature : Kadare

Finished Ismail Kadare's collection "Agamemnon's Daughter," and was particularly impressed by the 2nd of the 3 pieces, The Blinding Order, a really strange allegorical story (novella maybe) about an unnamed Muslim-Christian country whose government orders that anyone with the "evil eye" (a strange staring - such as someone standing and staring at a bridge under construction - who knows?, they may be trying to send destructive thought-waves to the bridge) be blinded by one of five methods, described. Obviously the story is by indirection and allusion an attack on the repression in Kadare's Albania or by extension in any totalitarian state - but what's impressive to me, first, as noted in yesterday's post, is the incredible bravery of Kadare in writing this piece and publishing it (abroad) at a time when he was living under the repressive Hoxner regime and subject to arrest or worse, and, second, the literary qualities of this piece - it's not just polemical or a rant or a thinly veiled analogy (cf., Animal Farm), but has its own strangeness and oddity, the creation of a peculiar, populated world - he focuses the story on one family in which future son-in-law is tapped to serve on the committee that metes the punishment and this basically destroys him and is marriage - also note the odd discussions as to who would get blinded by which method, the incredible distraction of life under tyranny when people debate the small things rather than the overall horror: all societies do this, to varying degrees, as we see in the U.S. today with the ridiculous debates about such distractions as illegal immigration as all the while taxes for the corporations and for the wealthy enjoy the largesse of their tax cuts. Last story in collection, The Great Wall, is a little more abstract and softer - perhaps because by this time Kadare living in exile, and, much like Kundera in France, losing is animus and edge?