Ismail Kadare

Fire and water take three of his ten planets each, with two apiece in earth and air, and five of the ten are mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record is short: Kadare was an Albanian novelist and the first International Booker winner.

Mercury sits in mild friction with Venus at twelve hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, which is the narrow friction those two can make at all, since Venus never separates far enough from Mercury for anything larger. The reading is a tendency to say the agreeable thing rather than the accurate one. For a novelist who published for decades inside a dictatorship and then outside it, that is a reading the record does not settle either way, and leaving it unsettled is more honest than choosing.

Mars sits in hard contact with Pluto at a quarter of a degree, force against force: power struggles, and situations where winning matters more than the thing being won. Jupiter sits in hard contact with Uranus at just over a third, growth arriving disruptively, and square Neptune at seven tenths, faith without evidence. The Sun sits on the eighth degree of Aquarius with Mercury at fifteen and retrograde, the sign built on not being told, and his Moon sits on the fourth degree of Aries at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out. Mercury, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. A novelist the record places in one country and one prize has four of his six closest contacts running to the slow planets, which is a chart about circumstance rather than about character.

He died at Tirana on 1 July 2024, at eighty eight, in the country he wrote about. Mars stood in easy contact with his natal Neptune at a tenth of a degree that day, Neptune square his natal Venus at thirteen hundredths and Pluto square his natal Uranus at under a third. The Moon was at its last quarter and twenty three per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.