Lloyd Jones (author of the excellent Mister Pip) visited Albania for six weeks in 1991, a country that is, as he put it, an hour’s flight from Italy and a hundred years behind Europe. Albania suffered long under Enver Hoxha, the Communist leader who broke with the Soviet Union, moved to the Chinese camp and then broke with them and throughout it all built the most isolated, paranoid and backward country in Europe. Hoxha died in 1985 and Albania gradually moved towards greater openness, but in the context of social and economic collapse. Jones describes well the incredible backwardness of the country in the cities, towns, and villages, the lack of any amenities and most services (virtually none outside of the capital), terrible housing, the completely intermittent supply of food especially in the countryside, the lack of any jobs or prospects, the flood of refugees onto boats to Italy to find varying degrees of success but most not good, a countryside and beaches bedecked with thousands of concrete firing bunkers to repel invasion, the primitive 19th century life in many of the country villages and farms, an essential warmth of many people but so many traumatized and stunted by their experience under Hoxha and his iron grip on society. The title of the book—biografi—refers to the individual biographies maintained by the security police on every individual in the country, biographies that determine and could ruin a life if even a distant relative had any questionable associations or behavior, even those of the most innocent or innocuous nature. It is impossible for those who have never lived under such a suffocating regime to appreciate the controlling nature of the system….one couple that Jones met had the chance to move to a larger apartment on the ground floor of a building but they refused because they were afraid that people on the street might overhear conversations in the apartment and report them to the police.

A focal part of the book is Jones’s search for a man named Shapallo who was snatched from anonymity to become a double for Hoxha in public events. In the book, Jones does track down Shapallo and spends time with him….but in fact, Shapallo never existed, he is an invention by Jones. This caused some consternation with publishers (one of which cancelled a contract); many were not sure how to characterize the book and some criticized Jones for being dishonest. It is an interesting combination of fact and fiction, but the reader is not aware of it until he/she reads the afterword to the book. In a sense, Shapallo represents the ultimate falsity of the regime, a world where no external representations can be taken as real, where everything and anything can be manipulated and faked and made “real”.

An interesting and entertaining read about a world in Europe that existed in its own bubble of time and space.

A story so strange you could not make it up. After the fall of Communism, the author travels through Albania in search of a man who was abducted one day by Government agents from his job as a rural dentist to fill a more important task - body double to the nation's leader, Enver Hoxha. He finds him.

Along the way, we find out all sorts of interesting things about the region little appreciated in the West. For example,. the author visits the village in the north-east of the country where the body double came from. The village's oldest residents greet him by saying "You're the first foreigner we've seen here since 1910!" When he asks who the last foreigner was, he's told "Oh, that was when Serbian soldiers crossed the border and burnt the village down!"

Those soldiers crossed the border from the disputed province of Kosovo, now given de facto independence. And this book., by describing the ethnic make-up of Albania and Kosovo, gives a chilling insight into international relations in the area. It makes no bones that the movement for Kosovar liberation had powerful backers with vested interests in America amongst the Albanian diaspora (especially its monarchist wing). I always wondered how the Kosovo Liberation Army got such nice, smart, new uniforms - and now I know.

But I digress. This book fills in a useful piece in the jigsaw of European history. ( )