Written by Ismael Kadare, it won the 2005 Booker Prize. I stumbled across it thinking I had not read enough about the Balkans. To be more precise, Albanian literature in my world is summarised by a few brief translated poems. The world in a city entirely made of stone that, in the course of the book, becomes sick, and bombarded, and rained on, seen through the eyes of a boy who (rightly) thinks that adult talk is boring, and strange (‘Italy is showing its claws’), and who at first likes fighter planes, even if they bombard other cities over the clouds. He also wants to read Jung because ‘he writes about magic’. It contains a description of an air raid that is more than amazing. It tells of women who stay indoors for years and years and of rain smiling secretly. It has sequences of sentences that we all dreamed about: ‘I looked at my hands. They were more nervous than I was. I put them in my pockets.’
The protagonist spends long days with his friends dreaming and wandering:
'His voice was deep and soothing, and as I leaned against the chaise longue, I dreamed of the magic of tobacco and tried to figure out how much I would smoke and how many books I would have to read in Turkish before my time to die would come. The thick books lay in the trunk, piled one on top of the other, an endless swarm of Arabic letters waiting to carry me off and reveal secrets and mysteries, for only Arabic letters knew the path to the mysteries, just as ants know the holes and fissures underground. '
‘Babazotti,’ I asked, ‘can you read ants?’ He chuckled softly and patted my tousled hair.
‘No, boy, you can’t read ants.’
‘But why not? When they’re all piled up together, they look just like Turkish letters.’
‘It only seems that way, but it’s really not true.
‘But I’ve seen them’, I insisted one last time.
As I drew on my cigarette, I wondered what ants were for if you couldn’t read them like books.
He then reads his first book (Macbeth), does not want to stop and then dreams about the letters:
‘You sleep, I’m going to read.’
‘No’, she said, ‘we don’t have enough kerosene.’
I couldn’t go to sleep. The book lay nearby. Silent. A thin object on the divan. It was so strange… Between two cardboard covers were noises, doors, howls, horses, people. All side by side, pressed tightly against one another. Decomposed into little black marks. Hair, eyes, legs and hands, voices nails, beards, knocks on doors, walls, blood, the sound of horseshoes, shouts. All docile, blindly obedient to the little black marks.
He swears at his puppy love and then has a crush on the woman who steals and who shows him a falling star:
To tell the truth, a star falling from the sky made about as much impression on me as a button falling off a coat, for Margaritas’s thick hair was spread across my neck and her hair, her whole body, had a subtle fragrance I had never noticed on Mamma, Grandma, or any of my aunts. Nor was it like any of the other smells I liked best, including the aroma of my favourite dishes.'
I haven’t used my ‘a book about xyz’ sentence yet and I would hate not to be up to your expectations. A book about writing, about pain, about magic and witchcraft, about permanence and transitoriness, about resilience and death.
