 I go on an imaginary tour of that strange city, the novelist's birthplace, Gjirokastr, as it struggled to make sense of a world turned upside down, from the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the messy birth of a young state. We tend to read about state building as the marriage of destiny and geopolitics, but it has also been an act of imagination. With Ismail Kadaria's death, Eastern Europe lost one of its last national authors.