Biografi
First line: I was looking for Petar Shapallo but the face that had been Petar Shapallo’s had vanished under the surgeon’s knife.
The word biografi refers to the Albanian system of kept files on every citizen during years under the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. Each Albanian citizen had a biografi. Entries to the files were either unintentional false constructions or ruthless falsifications to fit the official line, which would justify cruel and random punishments allocated to the respective citizens whose names labeled the biografi.
The 1994 novel BIOGRAFI by Lloyd Jones, the author of the wonderful Mister Pip, is an astonishing literary account of the author’s journey to Albania, a country, which according to him, was but an hour’s flight from Italy but another century removed from Europe. Jones’s visit to the terribly damaged country happened in 1991, six years after the death of Hoxha, when the country was still struggling to recover from the devastations Hoxha’s regime had inflicted. The narrative was woven around his search for Petar Shapallo, who, in the story, was a pathetic dentist who had a great resemblance to Hoxha, had been abducted from a remote village, had undergone plastic surgery, had been made to live as Hoxha’s body double and kept under house arrest, who had fled from certainty of death when the dictator died because he would be of no further use, and who had traveled the convalescing country to visit places from his past. When they finally met, the author/narrator joined the broken body double in the latter’s journey to the past as the former generously detailed his observations of the wreck – people and structures – left by the mad regime of Hoxha.
Biografi is a marvel.
Note: In Biografi, one of the characters explains partly how the farce novel The File on H by Ismail Kadare, an Albanian writer, sees the goings-on in the paranoid Albania after the fall of Hoxha. Indeed, Kadare mentioned Hoxha in The File on H, which I read last month.
{March 4, 2009}
The word biografi refers to the Albanian system of kept files on every citizen during years under the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. Each Albanian citizen had a biografi. Entries to the files were either unintentional false constructions or ruthless falsifications to fit the official line, which would justify cruel and random punishments allocated to the respective citizens whose names labeled the biografi.
The 1994 novel BIOGRAFI by Lloyd Jones, the author of the wonderful Mister Pip, is an astonishing literary account of the author’s journey to Albania, a country, which according to him, was but an hour’s flight from Italy but another century removed from Europe. Jones’s visit to the terribly damaged country happened in 1991, six years after the death of Hoxha, when the country was still struggling to recover from the devastations Hoxha’s regime had inflicted. The narrative was woven around his search for Petar Shapallo, who, in the story, was a pathetic dentist who had a great resemblance to Hoxha, had been abducted from a remote village, had undergone plastic surgery, had been made to live as Hoxha’s body double and kept under house arrest, who had fled from certainty of death when the dictator died because he would be of no further use, and who had traveled the convalescing country to visit places from his past. When they finally met, the author/narrator joined the broken body double in the latter’s journey to the past as the former generously detailed his observations of the wreck – people and structures – left by the mad regime of Hoxha.Biografi is a marvel.
Note: In Biografi, one of the characters explains partly how the farce novel The File on H by Ismail Kadare, an Albanian writer, sees the goings-on in the paranoid Albania after the fall of Hoxha. Indeed, Kadare mentioned Hoxha in The File on H, which I read last month.
{March 4, 2009}
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