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Chronicle in Stone A Novel Ismail Kadare Books

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Chronicle in Stone A Novel Ismail Kadare Books

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.


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Chronicle in Stone A Novel Ismail Kadare Books Reviews

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.
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.
This book, from the viewpoint of the narrator, a child, while his home town is besieged during war and revolution. His home city, build over many ages on the side of a mountain, on the border of Albania and Greece, is the stage for a series of the various factions who take power, then lose power as another gains control, as this child grows up. It is a fascinating study, not just of the twists and turns of his maturing mind, but a little of a history lesson of a town, and a culture, that is so like and unlike our own. It is a book well worthy of the awards it has received; a testament of survival and innocence, of time not far in the past, but eternal, as is the bud of hope the reader might take with them at the end of this child's tale.
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.