This is the last day of France week at A Traveler’s Library. We’ve cooked Tex-Mex in Paris, gone for walks looking for celebrities and for hidden (and not-so hidden) gardens and shared some pictures of travel in France. Now we’re going time traveling back to World War II–an exciting but dangerous time to be in Paris. Continue reading Secrets and Spies in Pre-World War II Paris
Destination: Portugal
Book: A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson
The intense drama of A Small Death in Lisbon zigzags between the 1940’s and 1990’s and between a Nazi thriller and a police procedural, but the focus is always Portugal, and mostly Lisbon. Continue reading Portugal is a Mystery
Destination: Albania
Book: Chronicle in Stone (org. 1971, NEW paperback edition) by Ismail Kadare
This amazing novel by a former Man Booker Prize winner brings to life Gjirokastër, a city on the southern edge of Albania, near the Greek border. The events during World War II in this city provide a microcosm of the shifting bands of conquerors that have moved through Albania over the ages. [amazon_link id=”161145039X” target=”_blank” ]Chronicle in Stone[/amazon_link] stops just before the paranoid rule of Communist dictators in the twentieth century, but the constant turmoil that is the history of this country explains a great deal about why it seems rivaled only by Romania in seeming inability to join the modern world.
Ismail Kadare is hailed as “Albanians best known poet and novelist,” and the fact that there are not a lot of competitors for the title does not take away from his power as a story teller. He is a master artist with words. His style is easy and simple on the surface, but full of symbol and metaphor and originality of thought.
As in our recently reviewed In the Country of Men, a young boy narrates tragic events. I felt even more appalled by the deprivation of life in Albania because the wartime tale came from the mouth of an innocent in Chronicle in Stone. Continue reading The Most Pathetic Country, Explained
