REVISED REVIEW! I was tired last night......I loved this book. Why? Well, what I loved most was the writing style. I scarcely realized I was learning about the events occurring in Albania 1941-43! The book description here at GR is practically nonexistent so I will explain a bit. Although fiction,this book is in fact about the author’s own experiences during the Second World War, when he was a child growing up in Gjirokastër, Albania. This is an ancient city near the Albanian Greek border. In 1939 Mussolini occupied Albania, but thereafter control switched several times between the Italians and the Greeks. Finally near the end of the war and until the summer of 1944, the Germans occupied Albania, The book does not continue through to the war’s end. Gjirokastër was extensively bombed. There were also fighting going on between the three dominant resistance movements: Isa Toska”s men (representing the Legaliteti, backing the exiled King Zog), the Ballists and finally the Partisans, who were Communists. This civil war led finally to the Communist takeover by Envor Hoxha. He too was from Gjirokastër. The city is made of stone houses, topped with slate rooves. When you leave your front door you are at the edge of your neighbor's roof - the slope is steep! This gray city has a strong presence in the novel. Trees and foliage, lawns and bushes are not what you find here. Such a world is far away only imagined at the markets where the peasants bring in their produce. The city has arisen from the earlier Turkish landowning people. It is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the book, the city itself, has an identity! This is the setting for the young boy’s experiences. Violent times, to say the least. Culturally the city has a Muslim Turkish heritage. This contrasts against the Greek/Christian/peasant culture. All of this is woven into the story. Different cultures, strange beliefs, bizarre people and shocking events – they are all part of this novel. At the center is a young boy trying to understand it all. One might think that such a time and place would not be the setting for a book filled with humor. This book IS filled with humor and irony. The boy is so imaginative, the words and thoughts will delight you. Sometimes you laugh at the kids’ lack of understanding, their attempts to understand an adult world that logically cannot be understood. Words and events are misunderstood, and we who read can chuckle at the search for knowledge and the irony of the crazy world that engulfs the city Diverse themes, from magic to girls to war to Shakespeare to sexual deviants, are all present. The author plays with words.And yet this is about war and when the tone suddenly switches you are struck by the huge contrast. Only by first laughing do you come to feel totally devastated when things go wrong. All of a sudden I realized how invested I had become in these people. There is a pronunciation guide and an exemplary introduction written by David Bellos. I read the introduction after finishing the book. I advise doing this. Often I dislike introductions. I hate it when they tell you how to interpret lines or tell us what we should be thinking/feeling! This introduction does not do that. It adds historical fact so you better understand the story itself. It tells of how Kadare rewrote this story repetitively. It explains what version we have in our hands. It speaks of the translator Arshi Pipa. Don't skip the introduction! It is very interesting, but first read the novel and let yourself be carried away by the play on words and imagination. I absolutely adored the literary style! I was emotionally captivated by these characters. Perhaps, as the introduction points out, there is even more said between the lines, but first just sit back and enjoy the story. Remember it is fiction. Don’t demand that it fulfills the criteria of logical sense, just enjoy it. Well that is what I think. I would not consider giving this book anything but five stars. I loved it. Every bit of it. It drew a picture of a difficult time and place. First it was very amusing and then it socked me in the stomach. .Here follows just one example of the humor found in this book:The last Italians left during the first week of November, four days after the evacuation of the aerodrome. For forty hours there was no government in the city. The Greeks arrived at two in the morning. They stayed for about seventy hours and hardly anyone even saw them. The shutters stayed closed. No one went out in the street. The Greeks themselves seemed to move only at night. At ten in the morning on Thursday the Italians came back, marching in under freezing rain. They stayed only thirty hours. Six hours later the Greeks were back. The same thing happened all over again in the second week of November. The Italians came back. This time they stayed about sixty hours. The Greeks rushed back in as soon as the Italians had gone. They spent all day Friday and Friday night in the city, but when dawn broke on Saturday, the city awoke to find itself completely deserted. Everyone had gone. Who knows why the Italians didn't come back? Or the Greeks? Saturday and Sunday went by. On Monday morning footsteps echoed in the street where none had been heard for several days. On either side of the street women opened their shutters gingerly and looked out. It was Llukan the jailbird, with his old brown blanket slung over his right shoulder. In his kerchief je was carrying bread and cheese, and was apparently on his way home."Llukan!" Bido Sherofi's wife called from a window."I was up there," said Llukan , pointing to the prison. "I went there to report, but guess what? The prison is closed."There was almost a touch of sadness in his voice. The frequent changes of rulers had made mincemeat of his sentence, and this put him out of SORTS. "No more Greeks or Italians, you mean?""Greeks, Italians, it makes no difference to me," Llukan answered in exasperation. "All I know is the prison isn't working. The doors are wide open.Not a soul around. It's enough to break your heart." (beginning of chapter 9)This is just one example of the humor. Please read the book so you can experience yourself the imagination of the main protagonist.**************************************I have read a bit more than half of this book. I absolutely adore it!!!!!I keep thinking I should stop and tell my GR friends. I think I simply must copy a bit so you get to see what I am reading. But then I simply can't. I have to keep reading, and I cannot copy the whole book as examples of why I am loving how this author expresses himself. What I love about this book are the lines. They are funny! How can war be funny? Well, what happens is so absurd you do laugh! Some lines are funny, others conjure a picture of gloom, others the delight of women in the eyes of an adolescent boy and then there is magic too. I don't really care what this author is talking about; it is how he says whatever he wants to say that is so wonderful.This book is much, much, much better than the author's The Three-Arched Bridge. Don't read that! Read this!
Chronicle in Stone, first published in Albanian in 1971 and sixteen years later in English in a translation whose author remains unidentified, describes life in a small Albanian town during World War II. The mystery of the novel’s translation was elucidated for me through an Internet search, and its story is worth telling: translated by an Albanian émigré who lived in the States and who is now dead, Arshi Pipa, the book was published without the translator’s name because he had entered into a conflict with the publisher and/or with the author, and as a consequence, he demanded to have his name taken off the translation. According to David Bellos, Kadare’s current translator into English (who was chosen by Kadare as the recipient of the translation prize awarded together with the Booker prize), the dispute is known as the “Pipi-Kaka quarrel.” Chronicle in Stone has an original structure in that each chapter is followed by an alternate chapter, a short “Fragment of a Chronicle” written by the town’s official chronicler. The regular chapters are written in the first person, in the voice of a child who seems very much an alter ego of the young Kadare, a child fascinated with words, who reads Macbeth, as Kadare himself did when he was eleven, and consequently applies its human drama to his neighbors, imagining blood and crime everywhere. Not that it was hard to imagine. In this little town ravaged by history, we see characters walking down the street with severed heads under their arms; the Italian fascists hang several young Albanian rebels, the Greek occupants kill “enemies” chosen according to the whims of their spies, and the Germans indulge in the killing of hundred-year-old women.Toward the end of the novel, the absurdity of the political situation culminates in a whirlwind-like scenario, in which within two weeks or so, the town changes hands several times: from the Italians to the Greeks, back to the Italians, back to the Greeks, the Italians, the Greeks, until finally no one is in control. Each time the Italians come, they bring along two groups of women, one of nuns and one of prostitutes. Each time the town changes hands, another proclamation by another Garrison Commander is posted and another flag is raised. Each time another flag is raised, the Albanian Gjergj Pula changes his name: to Giorgio (when the Italians come), to Yiorgos (for the Greeks) and to Jurgen Pulen before the arrival of the Germans, a name he never gets a chance to use because the Germans kill him as soon as they enter the town. Nor does he get to use “Yogura,” which he prepared in case of a Japanese invasion.Chronicle in Stone was published in Albania during the years of Enver Hoxha, who came to power with the Communist Party after World War II, and stayed there until his death in the mid-eighties. In this context, we can speculate on the reasons for the episodic appearance toward the end of the novel of a character described by the Italian Garrison Commander as “the dangerous Communist Enver Hoxha.” Although it is known that the dictator came from the same small town as Kadare, one wonders whether his presence is indeed historically justified or whether this was the price Kadare had to pay in order to publish his novel.
What do You think about Chronicle In Stone (2007)?
I visited Gjirokaster in Albania in 1984 during the last year of the life of the country's dictator, Enver Hoxha. This town is the setting for "Chronicle in Stone" first published by Ismail Kadaré in Albanian in Tirana in 1971. It was also his birthplace in 1936 and that of Enver Hoxha in 1908. I can attest that the city is indeed, to quote Kadaré's words, " ... a stone carapace" inhabited by human flesh. I did not realise until I read the book how many times the city had been occupied during WW2, repeatedly by the Italians and the Greeks, and finally by the Germans.The author must have been about 7 or 8 years old when Gjirokaster became a 'theatre' of war and was occupied by the Italian forces for the first time. As David Bellos points out in his 'Afterword', the narrator of the tale, a young boy, must have been a little older than Kadaré. The author describes the city's misfortunes through the eyes of an innocent young boy. The result is a magical yet also realistic and credible description of the effects of war and occupation on the inhabitants and fabric of his city. The narrator finds things interesting that the adults disdain. For example, his excitement and delight about the airfield constructed by the Italians and the comings and goings of their 'planes, which were clearly up to no good as far as Albania was concerned, upsets his family, who only see the bad side of its existence. At first, the boy is full of wonder about everything, but gradually the seriousness of the situation that he and his family are experiencing dawns upon him. This novel is, at the very least, a beautiful and unusual portrayal of modern war through the eyes of a child. It contains deeper meanings and messages, most of which would not have been lost on his Albanian readers who were living under the heel of a repressive dictatorship.Later on in the book, we are told of the arrival of the Communist partisans, who were under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, and we read things that may well have been risky to express whilst living, as the author was, under a repressive Stalinist regime, where any criticism of it was not allowed. However, Kadaré was criticised by the regime but never, unlike many of his fellow authors, imprisoned. The reasons for this are to some extent revealed in an interview published in the edition of the novel that I read and also in the author's brief book Albanian Spring: The Anatomy of Tyranny. In Albanian Spring: The Anatomy of Tyranny, Kadaré hints that the exiled Albanian writer Arshi Pipa may have tried to incite trouble over Chronicle in Stone for him from his place of exile in North America. Pipa, according to Kadaré, may have tried to persuade Enver Hoxha that this book about Gjirokaster contained coded messages detrimental to the Albanian Communist government and also to Hoxha himself.And, Pipa must have known the novel well because he was the first to translate it into English. Indeed, the edition that I have just read (Canongate, 2011) is a translation based on Pipa's. It has been edited by David Bellos who has added material that Kadaré added some time after first publishing it. Bellos has also written an interesting 'Afterword' that follows the novel. Following this, there is his translation of an interview between Kadaré and Stéphanie Courtois in which the reader can learn much about the struggles of artists, and writers in particular, living under a repressive regime.There is much to recommend this unusually constructed fictional history of an ancient city during times of war. It is an interesting, enjoyable, at times humorous, novel or fictionalised memoir, maybe. I have enjoyed reading it, and encourage everyone to experience it. Get the Canongate edition, if you can; the additional material that it contains is well worth reading.
—Adam
2.5 stars. A charming though often disturbing childhood account of an Albanian town's occupation in WWII. I couldn't wait to finish this book but for all the wrong reasons. For all the author's accolades and the rave reviews on Goodreads, aside from the shocking events in the closing chapters and the often lyrical characterisation of buildings, I just wasn't bowled over and had to really persevere with it. Normally I would set a book aside if I wasn't enjoying it but I did want to know the outcome which is why I stayed with it til the end. I won't be recommending it to anyone though.
—Fiona
Largely anecdotal and written in blistering prose, this book is a brilliant tale of a young boy growing up in occupied Gjirokaster, Albania. We learn about bomb shelters beneath the town citadel, heavily perfumed Italian soldiers, the fleeting appearances of the Greeks, and a boy's love for an aerodrome. This book was beautifully written and I loved it. Oh, one other thing. I think it reminded me a little bit of the movie Empire of the Sun--a young boy's unflagging optimism held against the larger forces of global politics.
—Elizabeth
