Without a doubt, this is the best book by an Albanian author that I’ve ever read. Is that trivially because it was my first? Only time will tell…
Ismail Kadare’s ‘Chronicle in Stone’ is the tale of a city, more than anything else. The city, Gjirokastër, is a city whose buildings are constructed primarily of stone. Living in this city is a strange fellow named Xivo Gavo, who keeps a chronicle of everything that happens in (and to) the city. Thus, we have the “chronicle” “in” “stone” (get it?).
Fortunately, we’re not subjected entirely to the point of view of the chronicler, whose work, appearing in snippets between chapters, is uninteresting, at best. In his place, we learn of the fate of hoary Gjirokastër through the small adventures of a young, nameless boy, likely patterned after the author himself. In this way, we get to see life amidst the horrors of World War II through the eyes of a child. If this sounds fascinating, I apologize for misleading you.
The main problem with ‘Chronicle in Stone’ is that the writing itself is rather unexciting. Kadare makes a few attempts to set up something interesting, and some of the inner musings of the narrator show promise (e.g. when, in the first chapter, he personifies the rain, imagining that each drop “plummet[s] into a deep prison”, which is the cistern below their house), but the inconsistency of these authorial in(ter?)ventions keeps them from becoming patterns the reader can latch onto. Consequently, when they reappear (such as the occasional and ultimately pointless references to Macbeth), the reader is left to wonder what meaning, if any, is to be taken away. All in all, the hand of the author is ever-present, and rarely is the reader allowed to get “lost” in the story.
The plot, by and large, moves between conversations between characters about the status of the city or the other characters. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, but many of the characters are simply undercharacterized. For example, I dare you to read this book and say anything about the narrator’s father and mother. Do they have names? I can’t honestly say. We learn a fair bit about his grandmothers, his grandfather, his neighbors, some of his friends, and some miscellaneous characters about the town. Of the characters we’re introduced to, there are two types: those that are interesting (the narrator; Suzana, a young girl with whom the narrator begins to experiment romantically; Ilir, the narrator’s friend and coconspirator), and those that can be described as “the one that…” (e.g. Kako Pino is the one that does brides’ make-up and constantly claims it’s “the end of the world”; Javer is the one that aspires to be a radical; Nazo’s daughter-in-law is the one that’s pretty; Qani Kekezi is the one that dissects cats, etc.). The result is a mess of characters that do little to distinguish themselves tangled up with a host of mere caricatures.
So, the big question is this: What are we left with? Oddly enough, what you get is a surprisingly realistic–and effective–portrayal of an ancient city at the mercy of foreign powers. In a way, the relative lack of literary devices lends authenticity to some of the more bizarre and disturbing moments in the book. When, for example, an English plane is shot down, and the crowd parades through the streets with the pilot’s severed arm, as a reader, I didn’t think, “Wow, what a bizarre episode this author has created”: that happened. The townspeople’s varied reactions to being occupied first by the Italians, then by the Greeks (and then the Italians, and then the Greeks, and then the Italians, ad infinitum), and finally the Germans, are too realistic to be treated as merely fiction. What we have, then, in ‘Chronicle in Stone’, is an account of a little-discussed society ravaged by war.
The last six decades have supplied us with innumerable stories of the second World War from France, Germany, Japan, the US, Italy, North Africa, China–but Albania? Who outside of Albania even knew they were in it! As such, ‘Chronicle in Stone’ fills a void, and is a worthy addition to the rich literary landscape of World War II–and, for that reason, worth reading.
David Peterson