Albania

Free

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Washington Post, Financial Times, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Times, and more

An astonishing and deeply resonant memoir that is by turns "bitingly, if darkly, funny…and truly profound" (NY Times), Lea Ypi writes about growing up in the last days of the last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century.

Family and nation formed a reliable bedrock of security for precocious 11-year-old Lea. She was a Young Pioneer, helping to lead her country toward the future of perfect freedom promised by the leaders of her country, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Then, almost overnight, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of her society toppled. The local statue of Stalin, whom she had believed to be a kindly leader who loved children, was beheaded by student protestors.

Uncomfortable truths about her family’s background emerged. Lea learned that when her parents had spoken in whispers of friends going to “university” or relatives “dropping out,” they meant something much more sinister. As she learned the truth about her family’s past, her best friend fled the country. Together with neighboring post-Communist states, Albania began a messy transition to join the “free markets” of the Western world: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. Her father, despite his radical left-wing convictions, was forced to fire workers; her mother became a conservative politician on the model of Margaret Thatcher. Lea’s typical teen concerns about relationships and the future were shot through with the existential: the nation was engulfed in civil war.

Ypi’s outstanding literary gifts enable her to weave together this colorful, tumultuous coming-of-age story in a time of social upheaval with thoughtful, fresh, and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political.

"Riveting. . .A wonderfully funny and poignant portrait of a small nation in a state of collapse. . . gloriously readable. . .One of the nonfiction titles of the year, it is destined for literary accolades and popular success.” ―Observer

"Utterly engrossing . . . Ypi's memoir is brilliantly observed, politically nuanced and—best of all—funny." ―Guardian

"Ypi is a beautiful writer and a serious political thinker, and in just a couple hundred readable pages, she takes turns between being bitingly, if darkly, funny (she skewers Stalinism and the World Bank with equal deadpan) and truly profound...Free is meant to inspire." ―NY Times Book Review

“I was entranced from beginning to end." ―Sunday Times

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Enver Hoxha

Note: If this book is chosen for the group read, we’ll read it over 2 months since it is 414 pages.

Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of communism, came to an end in most of Eastern Europe with the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 or at least with the Khrushchev reforms that began in the Soviet Union in 1956. However, in one country—Albania—Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from the time of the communist takeover in 1944 until his death in 1985, and that continued unabated under his successor Ramiz Alia until 1990, was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state, a European country that became as isolated from the rest of the world as North Korea is today. When the Albanian communist system finally imploded, it left behind a weary population, frightened and confused after decades of purges and political terror. It also left behind a country with a weak and fragile economy, a country where extreme poverty was the norm.

“Absolutely a fascinating read, being rather a journalistic approach to the subject than a classic biography.” —Passionnée des Livres

“The extraordinary story of how one man held an entire country hostage for 40 years—and got away with it. More importantly, it provides a voice to the dead, the disappeared, the exiled, and the purged, who are brought to life in a number of absorbing vignettes. Giving them a voice, something which Hoxha desperately tried to deny them, is perhaps Fevziu’s most profound achievement.” —Wild Tour Albania

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The Ghost Rider

Winner of the Man Booker Prize

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

“The novel itself, a relatively short one, is on one level a famous Albanian folk story which has been re-imagined as a medieval mystery. Beyond this, however, is a more complex tale which seeks to describe a sense of what it is to be Albanian…a story that shows how national identity was created and sustained in this small nation surrounded by many larger forces who sought to influence and control her throughout her history.” (Solar Bridge) A narrative that is based on the Albanian cultural precept that a besa, a sacred promise, must be fulfilled no matter what.

“Kadare’s fiction offers invaluable insights into life under tyranny—pointing both to the grand themes and small details that make up life in a restrictive environment. A great writer, by any nation’s standards.” —Financial Times

“One of Europe’s most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader’s consciousness.”
—Los Angeles Times

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

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A Girl in Exile

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

During the bureaucratic machinery of Albania’s 1945–1991 dictatorship, playwright Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. A girl—Linda B.—has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession.

He soon learns that Linda’s family, considered suspect, was exiled to a small town far from the capital. Under the influence of a paranoid regime, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to Linda B.

“Erotic, paranoiac and lightly fantastical.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Comparisons to Kafka are inevitable, but there’s also some Joseph Heller here. Kadare successfully renders Big Brother . . . A poignant narrative about exile.” —Publishers Weekly

“Myth and dream, memory and repression, all converge as the novel illuminates the essence of art in totalitarian Albania. An author respected throughout Europe should reach a wider American readership with this subversive novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

(A special thank you to book club member, Anna Ruth for the suggestion.)

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Like a Prisoner

Winner of the English Pen Award

The book contains 11 dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devise increasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters in different stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners’ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.

Fatos Lubonja is Albania’s most distinguished opposition intellectual. He served 17 years in prison during communism, and since his release has been a fierce critic of the erosion of democracy.

“This is an incredible book because it is not a personal record of Fatos Lubonja's endurance in that grave, but of those of his other fellow prisoners whom he met in his odyssey through Albania's hellish prisons under the Enver Hoxha regime. Stories of survival, confrontation and horrendous, inhumane abuse.” —Anglo-Albanian Association

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

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Negative Space

Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania.

For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman— the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl atop her shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand.

“Lleshanaku’s work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition.” —The Poetry Review

Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor.” —Poetry Nation Review

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