http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1270676...

Kadarë's classic account of growing up in his home city of Gjirokastër during the second world war. I've never been there though a friend of mine is one of the local MPs, a minister in the outgoing Albanian government. Another local, nameschecked here as 'Enver, the Hoxha boy', ended up running the country for four decades until his death in 1985.

Reading it so soon after Survival in Auschwitz made for an interesting contrast: Kadarë depicts an ancient society unwillingly dragged into modernity by the occupying Italians, Greeks and Germans, and by the British bombs dropped on the city. Our narrator tries to make sens of all this, by reading Macbeth and observing the weirdnesses of his neighbours and relatives.

The partisans are portrayed in a way as a brutal internal response - I am surprised that Kadarë got away with showing them as he did, in 1971; Hoxha's Albania was obviously very different from North Korea. And the war also terminates human relationships - directly, through death, and indirectly, through the destruction of the old customs of courtship and marriage - one of the most memorable characters is Kako Pino, who makes up the brides of Gjirokastër on their wedding days.

The truth is sometimes a bit difficult to pin down, and so is the exact text: the cover of the book says that the translation is by David Bellos, but Bellos in a very good introduction explains that the translation is mostly by Albanian dissident Arshi Pipa, who fell out with the original publisher and demanded that his name be removed. Bellos doesn't make it entirely clear if the English text here actually corresponds to any Albanian version of Kronikë në gur. For all that, it's Kadarë's least weird novel, of those that I have read, and perhaps his most approachable. ( )

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.