“Any resemblance between the characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” So states Ismail Kadare in his disclaimer for “The Successor” (Arcade, 207 pages, $24), a tale based on the still-unexplained death of Mehmet Shehu, who, until he was found shot dead in his own bedroom, had been Enver Hoxha’s assumed successor as the leader of communist Albania.

The parallel between the novel and real Albanian history, however, is only the beginning of the resemblances Mr. Kadare intends to unfold. The prequel to “The Successor,” published now as “Agamemnon’s Daughter” (Arcade, 226 pages, $24), finds explicit resonances between the rule of Hoxha and that of Homeric heroes. In the same disclaimer quoted above, Mr. Kadare writes that “The events of this novel draw on the infinite well of human memory, whose treasures may be brought to the surface in any period.”

For the nameless protagonist of “Agamemnon’s Daughter,” access to that infinite, collective well of memory begins tentatively. After enjoying a love affair with Mehmet Shehu’s young daughter Suzana, he now faces her withdrawal. Shehu has asked Suzana to cut off the affair, lest it complicate his political ascent.

Distraught, the narrator falls back on Ancient Greek myths. He sees Suzana as a sacrifice, like Iphigenia, killed to illustrate the ruthlessness of the leader. “Am I not going too far with these analogies?” he asks himself. Of course, Suzana is not killed like Iphigenia, but she is asked to terminate her love.

It takes a mass rally to convince the narrator that his analogy sticks. From his place in the grandstand, he spies Suzana. The entire ceremony represents, to him, the cancellation of love. After the demonstration, the crowd disperses, emotionally exhausted: “Two thousand eight hundred years before, Greek soldiers had probably left the scene of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in a similar state.”

Agamemnon, perhaps, did not sacrifice his daughter to propitiate the winds, as Homer states. He did it to change the mood. After witnessing, such a sacrifice, the army got serious:

Private Teukr, for instance, who up to then had planned on deserting at the first opportunity, now felt as if that idea belonged to a vanished epoch. Idomene, his comrade in arms, who’d been determined to answer back if his commander should dare speak to him roughly, now found that idea quite foreign as well. Same thing for Astyanax, who’d been planning on sneaking off to see his fiancée, an idea that up to then had seemed easier and easier as his longing for her grew greater.

The supreme leader, whether Agamemnon or Enver Hoxha, makes war on personal lives. The narrator believes that the termination of his love affair “was the harbinger of an irreversible impoverishment of ordinary life.”

Mr. Kadare is a master of this kind of storytelling, in which events wait for radical interpretations. He cycles through the same events, gaining ideas, until an originally stiff conceit — the death of Mehmet Shehu, suicide or murder? — turns translucent.

In “The Successor,” a simple murder mystery undergoes Rashomon-like retelling in the round, but in this case almost everyone believes that they themselves are responsible for the committed crime. The architect of Shehu’s new home believes that its beauty made the supreme leader, Hoxha, jealous. Hoxha, meanwhile, assumes that he made Shehu kill himself. Shehu’s successor believes that he was invited to kill Shehu, but failed to get there first.

The real discrepancy, however, exists not between members of the elite but between the elite and the public, who assumes there was some conspiracy. The truth, in every elite version, is much more subtle. The public expects political motivation. But the politicians experience something stranger than politics.

It is Shehu’s son and daughter — the same Suzana — who, like brother and sister in a folk tale, intuit just how strange their parents are. Shehu’s generation, which includes Hoxha, were linked not by “inner blood,” the kind that animated a thousand years of vengeful Albanian feuds, but by outer blood. “That’s to say, on the blood of others, blood they had drunkenly spilled in the name of Doctrine.”

Brother and sister recall “the very earliest Communist cells, where activists (male and female) slept (or did not sleep) together not by human custom, but in accordance with the prescriptions of Doctrine.” Once again, Mr. Kadare shows communism not to be a new terror but instead a perversion of the profoundest dimensions. In comparison, the murderous generations of Albanian clans, and the curse of the house of Atreus, seem healthy and human.

In his epilogue, the ghost of Shehu, floating in space, describes his ilk:

Don’t try to work out where we went wrong. We are but the offspring of a great disorder in the universe. And as we came into the world, by mistake, in accursed cohorts, on each others coattails . . . Pray that as we gyrate to no end in the dark abyss of the universe, we never happen to spy in the blackness and far distance the light of the terrestrial globe, and — like cutthroats who happen on the village where they were born — we exclaim: “Oh, but that’s Earth!”

Mr. Kadare sees a line of coattails, stretching from Enver Hoxha back to Agamemnon, motivated not by any curse of the gods but by a kind of chain reaction, a spark of realization: the notion that inhumane acts trump human power.