As stated in the last page of the book, it took Ismail Kadaré five years to write this novel between 1962 and 1966 when he was in Tirana. One can wondAs stated in the last page of the book, it took Ismail Kadaré five years to write this novel between 1962 and 1966 when he was in Tirana. One can wonder whether "The General od the Dead Army" was nail-biting business involving many stopovers for the Albanian author or if Kadaré himself was tied-up with other things in those days.
The idea behind the book is an excellent one: a general and a priest (both left nameless) from the Italian army going to Albania in the 1960s in order to dig out the bodies of the soldiers sent on the other shore of the Adriatic sea by Mussolini between 1938 and 1942. Men who found their death in a relatively unknown little country with their families claiming for their bones to return home.
The macabre but humanitarian task to find, collect, identify and ship back to Italy the mortal remains of the long dead soldiers is allowed by the Albanian communist authorities. A political gesture which could be seen a sign of reconciliation between the two countries twenty-five years after the Italians invaded Albania looking at it as a mere stepping stone on their way to subjugate Greece.
Whereas it took barely three days to the Italian forces to "conquer" the tiny Balcanic country thus adding up the Albanian kingdom to the Italian crown, the following Greek expedition was an utter failure.
The fascist forces were soon driven back by the Greeks onto the Albanian mountains and plateaux finding themselves struggling for survival amid the coldest winters they could imagine and caught between the fires of local partisans and Hellenic soldiers. The Italian domination of Tirana and surroundings lasted for approximately four years giving enough time to print stamps and banknotes, raise monuments and awfully grand buildings as well as affecting the local population with arrests, fusillades and rapes.
You wouldn't be surprised to know that when the Italians started retreating, with Germans taking their place in committing atrocities, Albanian partisans hit the former occupying forces back in reprisal. Hence violence kept spreading with more killings and more mass graves.
In fact, Kadaré believes that the hatred of the recent past has not been forgotten. The general and the priest may have Albanian experts and drivers within their expedition and hire gravediggers in the villages they stop by but are far from being welcomed by the local farmers and peasants.
There is never a clear hostility of the Albanians towards the general and the priest, but they both feel a sort of uneasiness around them and don't even try to mix up with the locals. At least that's what they do till the very last night of their Albanian year long travel, a night where the General insists to celebrate the end of their task going to a wedding. A decision which will make the very last hours of the Italian duo in Albania quite shocking, stirring up old rancours colliding with the sacred importance given to hospitality by the local population.
All in all, what we have here is a slow-placed novel dealing with a potentially very poignant topic but treated and developed in a somehow cold blooded way which could disappoint many readers. But one must not forget that this same cold blooded view on the hard business of digging out corpses from the Albanian soil, guessing their height from the bones and matching it with a list of dead soldiers names is precisely the message Kadaré aimed to deliver.
This is a book about loneliness and a book about bitter memories. The loneliness of the Italian general reluctantly appointed to his grievous task who tries to wash it away with brandy and the bitter memories of the elderly Albanian woman who stares at his clumsy dizzy dancing during a wedding.
If I had to give a colour to "The General of the Dead Army", it would definitely be grey. The grey of consolidated mud, the grey of stones, the grey of gravel. The grey of dirty uniforms. The grey of bones.
Here we have a book which shows very little hope with Ismail Kadaré being well aware of its unpleasantness. A novel where the pace is set by the monotonous clash of spades against hard soil. Spades which once buried bodies and spades which later dug the same corpses out. The dry words chosen by Kadaré here are just like spades: they can bring back dead soldiers to light, but cannot heal the wounds which killed them and those they inflicted. ...more
"Broken April" is a haunting story with an out of time charm. There are not many novels around with such a simple and yet powerfully evocative style. "Broken April" is a haunting story with an out of time charm. There are not many novels around with such a simple and yet powerfully evocative style. More than the plot in itself what counts here is the atmosphere Kadare is able to recreate.
I actually perceived the mist and the cold as well as the brightless nights and the wind-swept landscapes where the novel takes place with an uncommon intensity. As a reader who gets easily distracted, "Broken April" meant an unusual business to me: this book never lost its grip over me from the very first to the last page.
I don't know that much about Albania apart from being aware that Italian fought a useless and aggressive war there ("We will break the kidneys of Albania!" barked Mussolini back in 1939) and that the country hosted one of the most senseless dictators - even for the crazy communist standards - in the world, Enver Hoxha. For a striking majority of Italians, contemporary Albania is a God-forsaken country, a place good for ruffians, pimps, prostitutes and hosting bogus universities where our dull politicians get their fake degrees.
Besides, the massive waves of desperate immigration coming from the coasts of Albania which reached Italy in the 1990s didn't help in the way our neighbours are perceived. It's true how there are Albanians involved in criminal activities in Italy, but then again it's always the bad guys who get all the news. Just like it happens with Romanians - who share a similar bad reputation in Italy and had a megalomaniac dictator too - there are thousands of good, honest, hardworking and considerate Albanian immigrants between the Alps and Sicily. But this is pretty obvious, isn't it?
"Broken April" deals at the same time with backwardness and cultural heritage of Albania introducing the equally wonderful and terrifying "Kanun" an ancient code to settle arguments and controversies in the remote Albanian plateaus. A code where vengeance through family feuds under brutal but strict rules is a focal point and that reminded me quite a lot the way disputes were handled in some parts of southern Italy and Sardinia. The Albanian Kanun, however, seem to be more structured and taken more seriously by the local inhabitants than its Italian less official counterparts.
This novel speaks about the Kanun and the people living (and quite often dying) according to its principles, but it's also an excellent cross-section of the Albanian mountaineers, a people able to welcome the Church and the Islam without losing most of its peculiar habits and with a fascination for towers.
There is a distinct beauty in the uniqueness of "Broken April" and this quality more than compensates the slight disappointment of a plot and an ending which could have been a bit better. Not that it really matters as what makes this novel very good is not its storytelling, but where the story itself happens. This is the first book by Ismail Kadare I've ever read and most likely the first of a long series. Here we have an author who definitely has something to say and somewhere to speak about. I'd like to listen more of it....more
Reading this book equals to trying to take off an old layer of plaster from a wall using some tin foil. Sure, if you scrub really hard, a few pieces oReading this book equals to trying to take off an old layer of plaster from a wall using some tin foil. Sure, if you scrub really hard, a few pieces of plaster could give way, but you know things would get better having a piece of sand paper.
For "The Country Where No One Ever Dies" (TCWNOED for short) by Ornela Vorpsi is not a bad book overall, but it's wrapped in tin foil thus merely scratching the surface of an interesting topic - Albania in the 1980s - leaving you dissatisfied at the end. Still, it would be unfair saying that this collection of vignettes jointed to each other in a sort of novella is hard to read. In fact, quite the contrary: Vorpsi has an effective writing style mixing up childhood memories with fiction and reaching the heart of the matter with carefully chosen words.
Nothing seems superfluous here and that's good, but writing something more would have not been bad either. The point of view of a little girl growing up in Tirana is not always convincing but manages to give some insight on Albania.
Vorpsi works well when she focuses on what the little girl sees and perceives: odd elderly people, unfortunate neighbors, local gossip, the influence of the party on everyday's life, her mum, her dad. Vorpsi doesn't sound very convincing when she tries to put sex in the context: here she overdoes it. For example, I haven't quite understood why adults of her own family keep on calling "a whore" the young girl with different names whose short stories make this book. Is it because the author wants to show us how male chauvinist, backwardish and sexually aggressive the Albanian society could be? Or maybe is it because the girl - like Vorpsi herself - tries to develop an independent personality against all odds?
I'm afraid only Ornela Vorpsi could answer. She certainly looks happy to have left Albania behind her therefore, some ill feeling could be justified. But, believe me, this book would have been better without a few jarring notes about sex.
To recover Vorpsi's reputation as a novelist, I don't think it's an act of sacrilege stating that in its best parts TCWNOED has a certain affinity with "The Land of Green Plums" by Herta Müller. I hope miss Vorpsi will take it as a compliment. No plagiarism involved, just a similar choice of writer's palette.
Of course the Romanian Nobel Prize winner is a more talented - and more experienced - writer, but if Vorpsi will be able to get over herself and her obsession for sexual interludes, some pretty good books may follow "The Country Where No One Ever Dies". Let's see what's next. ...more