NovelWorld

Imagine a remote, superstition-gripped village in the mountains of Albania clinging to such a steep slope that when drunks fall off the sidewalk, they land on someone’s roof.

That’s the setting of Ismail Kadare’s CHRONICLE IN STONE ($25), newly updated, revised, re-assembled and published complete for the first time in English by Arcade/Hachette. The wonder-filled little town is based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokaster. It’s a world where witchcraft is a practical concern, eyeglasses are considered shocking, and the severed arm of an English pilot can become a sacred relic.

Now under Italian rule, now Greek rule, now German rule, the characters in this little village loom as mythic figures in the eyes of the near-sighted boy narrator, whose whimsical imagination struggles to understand a world of resistance fighting and Allied bombing, a world where a girl who kisses a boy in public can disappear forever.

Kadare is a world-class novelist, now 70, a Nobel Prize candidate and winner of the first Booker International prize. This loving tribute to his childhood is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s a polished, many-faceted autobiographical jewel laced with horror and humor, compassion and a goofy childhood imagination. It’s a whole new world within book covers. Welcome to Albania.

At first glance, the character names look Aztec. You feel like you’ve stumbled into a science fiction novel. This is because Albanian is unrelated to any language spoken in modern Europe.

Language isn’t the only thing that seems alien at first in this isolated Balkan world, but that only increases the humanity of the delightful characters you grow to love: Selfixhe, the matriarch grandmother who foretells the coming war from chicken bones, Kako Pino, the bridal makeup artist (“People never stop getting married”), Llukan the Jailbird who protests the opening of the jail and freeing of the prisoners, Argjir Argjiri, half-man and half-woman, who scandalizes the town by getting married, and Dino Cico, the mad inventor, with his fuel-less wooden airplane that will save Albania.

And that barely skims the surface. From the teacher who steals local cats for dissection to the boy who searches neighborhood wells for the body of the girl he was caught kissing, you’re swept up in a fascinating, alien world living by its own laws. Consider the terrors of your cistern overflowing from heavy rains, when the cistern is on the roof of your house.

Kadare has written over fifty books, many of which are available in French (he now lives in France), only a few in English. Some of them look politically complicated and historical and symbolic. This one isn’t. It’s a narrative banquet, a chain of one brilliant, warm-hearting scene after another, all linked together, told by a shy, bright kid who’s fallen in love with Macbeth. It’s in the tradition of Marjane Satrapi (PERSEPOLIS) and David Mitchell (BLACK SWAN GREEN), a childhood world re-created in literature so completely it becomes an entire little universe the reader can return to again and again.

Quibbling commentators make a big deal about Kadare’s political affiliations. Sure, in a Communist country, he gave communism some lip service. Kadare simply wanted to remain a living writer. He didn’t exactly have an option. An author says as much as he can get away with and still stay alive to write more.

“The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship,” says Kadare, and as you’ll see in this simple, honest, child’s view of a war-torn mountain town, no one side is completely right. Collaborators and partisans, revolutionaries and reactionaries, even the hated occupying Italians, all get a compassionate word from this superbly ironic commentator on the human comedy, Albanian-style.