Chronicle in Stone: A Novel

Highly praised for its lyrical prose and a very interesting insight into the history of Albania. Granted, all of it true and valid in the book. BUT the writer comes from another generation and if you are a woman reading this, you are reminded of the misogeny of those times not that long ago. I simply can nolonger read of "old crones" and "young sluts" and not have a reaction. I am grateful for the historic perspective but i could not appreciate or finish the book with its continuous ill will toward women - except the grandmother, of course!

Chronicle in Stone is a searing coming-of-age novel, set during World War II in an Albanian hill town that has the misfortune of lying between Italy and Greece. Gjirokaster, today a UNESCO World Heritage site, is built of stone from the Southern Balkans and counts amongst its citizens Muslims, Christians, Gypsies, nuns, and prostitutes. Its highest peak is capped by a formidable fortress that has repelled invaders as far back as The Crusades; it is here that every segment of Gjirokaster society seeks refuge during the worst of the Allied bombings, peasants mingling with nose-holding aristocrats.The protagonist, a young Muslim boy who reads Macbeth and loves words, imagines the picturesque homes of Gjirokaster to be living creatures, each with its own story. Even the cistern in his home’s basement speaks to him, and the planes from a nearby airfield become big-bellied friends that he imagines couldn’t possibly hurt him.The boy at first casts an amused eye on the town’s traditions, such as its fear of witchcraft and the ancient women who haven’t ventured outside in decades. He grows more observant as he notes the violence inflicted on those who flaunt its sexual mores. One man, likely a hermaphrodite, is killed the morning after his wedding for the audacity of falling in love. During a bombing, a young girl kisses her secret boyfriend and is hauled home by her hair, where she disappears in what her ever-searching boyfriend fears is an honor killing. A woman, who reveals herself as a lesbian, is dismissed with the euphemism of “having grown a beard” and banned by her own father from the safety of air raid shelters.Chronicle in Stone proves the cruelty not only of wartime, but of unexamined traditions and of a culture that attacks its own iconoclasts. The boy’s great wisdom lies in the growing realization that not all the traumas of wartime are inflicted by invading armies.

This is a quietly spectacular tale of an Albanian city ravaged by wars, conquest, partisanship and the general human comedy. The voice is that of a little boy, whose partial views of his family and friends are endearing. The characters are terrific, reminiscent of the universal family types found in world literature. The city endures, even as its denizens pass away, but they leave their scars and monuments on its walls. I had only read The Traitors’ Niche by Kadare, and didn’t really like it. This was a great read. Im glad to have given this great author a second look.

Throughout the Cold War era, the Albanian People's Republic was ruled with an iron hand for nearly fifty years by Enver Hoxha, a man virtually unknown to the West. Thus, it is certainly by no means accidental that Ismail Kadare sets his wry, satirical novel, CHRONICLE IN STONE, in Hoxha's (and, remarkably, Kadare's) hometown of Gjirokaster, an ancient stone town not far from the Greek border. Hoxha actually appears as a marginal character in the story as a Communist partisan sought by the invading German army. In addition, and presumably biographically, the author at one point mentions in passing that among those lost to a recent aerial bombardment was one L. Kadare.In the early years of World War II, Gjirokaster suffers the travails of an essentially defenseless city, overrun first by the Italian Army, then the Greeks with the assistance of the British Royal Air Force, and eventually the Nazis before finally succumbing to the oppressive thumb of Stalinist Russia. The uneducated townfolk, still heavily prone to superstition and fantastical beliefs, exchange rumors of a red-bearded man, Yusuf Stalin, who will drive out the unwelcome invaders. "Is he a Muslim?" one character asks another. After a moment's hesitation, the other replies confidently, "Yes. A Muslim." "That's a good start," the first answers. Later, it is the infamously sun-glassed Hoxha who is believed to have started a new kind of war, the one that brings the Germans to Gjirokaster.Kadare hilariously personifies the absurd effect of this constant changing of hands. Albanians leks become Greek drachmas, then Italian lire, then back to leks again. At one point, a plane drops leaflets on the town that begin, "Dear citizens of Hamburg." When the Italians first arrive, a lesser resident named Gjergj Pulo changes his name to Giorgio Pulo, then to Yiorgos Poulos when the Greeks take over. He dies under the German occupation just after having applied for another name change, this time to Jurgen Pulen. The townswoman whose business it is to prepare the make-up for brides on their wedding day is given to repeating the phrase, "It's the end of the world," at every news event and new revelation.CHRONICLE IN STONE is narrated through the eyes of an impressionable young boy, perhaps eleven or twelve years old. In the first third of the book, events are seen almost entirely through the boy's impressionable and naïve eyes. After he discovers a book by Jung and reads "Macbeth," however, those eyes seem to take a gradually maturing and more jaundiced look at his surroundings. In fact, Kadare uses multiple references to sight and blindness throughout much of the book. Early on, his boy narrator even likens blindness to a stopped up toilet, where the many sights a person has taken in have somehow formed a blockage that prevents new ones from passing through.Kadare revels in the boy's sense of wonder, his susceptibility to superstition and magical occurrences, and his lack of appreciation (and fear) over the true horrors of war. Gjirokaster takes an a dreamlike impossibility, like one of Escher's impossible prints, where "...if you slipped and fell on the street, you might well land on the roof of a house..." Water collected into a cistern from a heavy storm becomes in the boy's imagination individual, personified droplets, the new ones joining uncomfortably with the older ones already there. Mice skittering about the attic at night become Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes. After watching ants scurry about the ground, the boy asks if his grandfather can "read" ants, since their random movements look to the boy like Turkish characters forming and reforming.Not that the town's adults are much more modern. Gjirokaster is still a land of crones and witches, prophecies and superstitions. Airplanes are fantastic flying machines, taking off and landing from a newly built airfield whose paving seemed little more than an unreasonable deprivation of the cows from their usual grazing. A local townsman plans to build a flying machine powered by a perpetual motion engine to defend the town from invaders and bring honor as well for its wondrous invention. An English airman's severed arm takes on such an iconic, almost mystical significance that it ends up in a museum and is attributed as the source of miracles.CHRONICLE IN STONE stands magnificently with so many of Kadare's works as a darkly humorous but fully humanistic tale of life under the most strained of circumstances. Cross Franz Kafka with Garcia Marquez, and Kadare is what you get. He is a writer far too little known as yet to Americans - he deserves better.

The prose was amazing.....it was like a wind that picked you up and carried away to a foreign land, and the words were pictures blowing past you like multicolored leaves in a vibrant, moving city of Stone. The candid view of a young boy in Albania, and a poignant and moving reality of the plight of simple Albanians as various countries warred their way through, destroying and altering lives forever. The French, Greeks, Turks, Italians Occupied, but the Germans destroyed. A writer I want to know more about.

I had never heard of Ismail Kadare but, just as with Eric Newby, taking the Lonely Planet Guide to the World's recommendations on a book about each country has opened up a new vista of reading.The book contains the somewhat disjointed and inexplicable experiences of a boy of about six in Gjirokaster, Southern Albania, between 1940 and 1944. It is, in essence, a series of his own recollections. Kadare has created remarkable characters who exist centrally or peripherally in his own life - his paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, his older cousins and his close friends, and the tantalising and inexplicable girls - seen through the eyes of someone who does not really understand what is going on but whose imagination builds on the half-heard comments of the adults. He also sees the city itself as almost a living thing.Kadare was writing in Stalinist Albania and his works had to tread the fine line between reflecting his disagreement with the state legally and illegally - which could have led to execution. This work was first published in Albania in 1971. Especially interesting therefore, in this edition, which I got second hand through Amazon, is an extended interview with Kadare dating from 2006 in which he talks about what it was like to be a writer in Albania during the evil years of Enver Hoxha.A wonderful book - and I shall now read more of his work.

Gjirokaster is an ancient stone city in southern Albania - not far from the Greek border. It was the birthplace and hometown of the wonderful novelist, Ismail Kadare. It was also where the terrifying Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha came from. Hoxha is a ghostly figure who lurks on the peripheries of many of Kadare's books (e.g.  The Successor  and  Agamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories ). And this, his great (semi-autobiographical) masterpiece, Chronicle in Stone is no exception. As I'm due to return to Albania in a few weeks, I eagerly picked this book up on holiday and my expectations were surpassed.The narrator is a young boy trying to come to terms with the turmoil of war. His ancient city is swarming with occupiers, collaborators, revolutionaries, survivors, ordinary folk just trying to exist. And in the early 1940s, all is confusion - only a few decades after Albania's independence from the Ottoman Empire, the city changed hands several times back and forth between Italians, Greeks (with the aid of the British RAF bombers), Nazis - not to mention the various Albanian factions each with their own agendas (monarchists, nationalists, communists). Trying to understand the world of adults is hard enough for children - but when this is going on, it's impossible.Kadare recaptures the innocent confusion of children with pitch perfect poignancy. Here is a little moment where the young narrator has a go."I wondered how it was that it had occurred to people to pile up so many stones and so much wood to make all those walls and roofs and then call that great heap of streets, roofs chimneys and yards a city. But even less comprehensible were the words "occupied city", which came up more and more in the grown-ups' conversations. Our city was occupied. Which meant that there were foreign soldiers in it. That much I new, but there was something else that bothered me. I couldn't see how a city could be unoccupied. And anyway, even if our city wasn't occupied, wouldn't there be these same streets, the same fountains, roofs and people? Wouldn't I still have the same mother and father and wouldn't Xhexho, Kako Pino, Aunt Xhemo and all the same people still come to visit?" (p25)Without giving much away, these words would prove to be strangely prescient.One aspect of childhood that Kadare vividly evokes throughout the book is the inability of young children to understand metaphor and allusion (let alone the simple issue of gravity). Everything gets taken too literally. Here our narrator is chatting with his best friend Ilir. His wonderful imagination gets carried away as he processes what they have overheard. The cause of some of the confusion is that he and Ilir a few months before had secretly gone to check out the local abattoir.Ilir raced down Fools' Alley."Guess what?" he said, as he came through the door. "The world is round like a melon. I saw it at home. Isa brought it. It's round, perfectly round, and it spins without stopping." He took a long time to tell me what he had seen."But how come they don't fall off?" I asked when he told me there were other cities under us, full of people and houses."I don't know," Ilir said. "I forgot to ask Isa. He and Javer were home looking at the globe. Then Javer tapped it with his finger andsaid, `Soon it'll be a slaughterhouse.'""A slaughterhouse?""Yes. That's what he said. The world will drown in blood. That's what he said.""Where will all the blood come from?" I asked. "Fields and mountains don't have blood.""Maybe they do,' said Ilir. "They must know something, they way they talk. When Javer said the world would be a slaughterhouse, I told him we'd been there and had seen how they slaughter sheep. He started laughing and said, `Now you'll see what happens when they slaughter nations.'""Nations? Like on the postage stamps, you mean?""Right. Like that. Nations.""Who's going to slaughter them?"Ilir shrugged. "I didn't ask."I thought about the slaughterhouse again. One day when she was talking about the aerodrome Xhexho said that the fields and grasses would be covered with cement. With wet slipper cement. A rubber hose sluicing cities and nations. To wash away the blood... Maybe we were only at the beginning of the slaughter. But I found it hard to imagine nations being led to the slaughter, bleating as they went. Peasants in their black woollen cloaks. Butchers in white coats. Rams, ewes, lambs. People standing around to watch. Other people just waiting. Then it was time. France. Norway. The square awash with blood. Holland bleating. Luxembourg like a newborn lamb. Russia with a big bell around its neck. Italy a goat (I don't know why). Something mooing all on its own. Who could that be? (p91-92)The book opens with a massive rainstorm (which causes all kinds of overnight chaos with flooding cisterns and streets) - but within a few pages the storm abates, and all is calm."I went back up the two flights to the living room, looked out and saw with joy that far off, at a distance too great to measure, a rainbow had appeared, like a brand-new peace treaty between mountain, river bridge, torrents, road, wind and city. But it was easy to see that the truce would not last long." (p10)And in many ways that longed for, far off peace treaty is what everyone in the city craves, as the storms of war descend. The book doesn't end with a rainbow. Interestingly, as the excellent introduction by David Bellos observes, it doesn't end with Enver Hoxha's triumphant conquest of his own country in the name of the people - we just know that it is coming (though not as triumphant as he'd have liked). This is in itself a sly form of Kadare's rebellion against the official propaganda about the inevitability of the regime's victory. But that is part of the book's brilliance. He sustains his artistic and human integrity without compromising too much with the regime he submits too.This boy (clearly based on Kadare himself) is a impressionable, curious and above all resilient observer of the world he's in - and he sees the glimmers of hope even in the darkest corners. He is obsessed with Shakespeare's Macbeth which he discovers in the course of the book - and sees all kinds of resonances within the stone walls of his own medieval home town. And the walls have seen it all. The people who inhabit them pass - but the walls survive (despite the aerial and artillery bombardments) - and tell their story. They are a chronicle in stone of the many rulers that have claimed Gjirokaster as their own.But this book, a chronicle in its own right (interspersing the narrative with only apparently snippets of news items, observations and reflections), is a true act of bravery. First published in Albanian in 1971 when the Hoxha regime seemed so unassailable, to even hint that it might pass was potentially reckless. But it is more than a brave book. It is also a beautiful book and a humane book. And I suspect it is a book I will return to again and again. The SuccessorAgamemnon's Daughter: A Novella and Stories

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster, southern Albania, the same town in which this book is apparently set. He studied in Albania's capital Tirana, and Moscow, returning to his homeland in 1960 after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union.I found this to be a beautiful and eloquently written book, based on a childs perceptions of war - the outbreak of WW2. The age of the child is unspecified, but one wonders whether this book is at least autobiographical, given the age of the author and the fact that it is apparently set in his hometown. The child, whomever and however old he is, has a vivid imagination, seeing images in raindrops and imagining that the echo from the cistern is an actual voice and therefore consciousness, answering him back.Life is not easy for this child, as he grows up in one of Europe's most superstitious countries, steeped in tradition, where any form of moral transgression is severely frowned upon - the men as they say are men, and the women, women, who have to know their place. When the boy pays a visit to the local slaughterhouse, he tries to imagine what the slaughter of a nation would look like, and sadly it is not too long before he begins to find out.The first sign that anything is amiss is when an aerodrome begins to be built. The narrator is excited by this event, imagining the planes with their own personalities, just like people, but the adults around him recognise that this is the first sign of war. Then the blackouts begin, with his house, or rather the cellar, turned into an air raid shelter, where half the villagers, or so it seems, seek refuge. As the air raids intensify, the villagers begin to share their stories, one by one, and we learn what makes these people tick.The city oscillates between Italian, Greek and German control, with each vying among themselves as the most hated occupier. The young of the village, including one of the boys own relatives, begin to join the Partisans (Resistance), but the old among them (mostly women) fear that the young girls will bring shame on their families by mixing so freely with unmarried men. Some are invetitably caught and brought back, but then the Commander of the Garrison is assasinated and the trouble really begins, with executions and all sorts of reprisals, until the Partisans begin to fight and kill each other. When the Italians eventually leave, the Communist Partisans pour in, carrying out what they term as `revolutionary justice', but then the Germans come, following the mass exodus of most of the population into the surrounding mountainous villages. Only a few old women, whom the author refers to as "crones" remain, with a few other brave or foolhardy souls.From their mountain refuge, their hear the gun fire and see their city in flames, until all goes silent and they eventually return to find the city burnt out and bodies swinging from lamp posts, lynched as traitors and informers. The war is not yet over, but at this point, the book is, with one wondering what happens next.To sum up then, this is an excellent book, written by one who can justifably be called Albania's national author, it may not tell you everything about that small country, which remains as Europe's last bastion of Communism, but it goes a long way to helping one to understand the Albanian soul.

This is one of Kadare's greatest books in my opinion. His portrayal of the second world war through the eyes of a young child living in a Albanian town ravaged by Italians. Greeks and Germans is poignant, not without humour and beautifully written as the writer captures each of the boy's experiences. This writer is too much neglected.

An amazing book, where Kadare describes in a fantastic way his childhood in his hometown (Gjirokaster) during the war.I am currently reading another book from Kadare and still impressed with such simplicity but still, intelligent way of writing.Highly recommend it, you won't be disappointed. Probably disappointed as you yould like the story to continue.