“And if no one tells me a story tonight, I know that one day, when I have all the words I need, I’ll tell them to myself.”
Finalist of the XXVI edition of the Edoardo Kihlgren Opera Prima Literary Prize, the title does not lie: in the book there are fables and it talks about communism. We are in Albania, between the 80s and 90s, under the communist regime of Hoxa. Said like that, one can easily think that it is a historical book, which philosophizes about a regime, about the politics of the last century… but, readers, remember the title.
In the book each story is interspersed with a fable, set in a distant or recent past and in the Land of the Eagles – the happiest country in the world -, a place always undefined, but the brightest note here is the irony. We read the fables and we feel like the child readers that we were, accompanied by the sweet and almost sing-song rhythm of the fables, with a beautiful ending complete with a frame “the moral of the fable is” and there, right there you find the irony!
The narrative voice is clear, clean and sincere: we are in front of a nine-year-old girl and the whole history of her country is filtered through her eyes and her thoughts. Having admitted this, let’s avoid demanding critical or witty points of view on this story. Let’s enter Ari’s world.
A bittersweet contrast is created between the circumscribed and everyday world of children and the broad and harsh world of history with a capital H. So you will find jarring, but ever so emblematic, juxtapositions between a revolution in progress and our protagonist who thinks that all this has cost her a lost day of school!
In the editorial office we read it and discussed it in our reading groups, and someone said it well: it is a book that thinks about what is present and what is absent.
Our little girl’s mother is not there; a distant mother and a little girl entrusted to her grandparents; a distant mother and a child who does everything to look for her and find her.
The reader, at the end, is asked, at least so it seemed to us, a strange game of imagination: the mother is reached, but the narrator refused to tell us! The little girl has grown up and we find her catapulted into a present that almost coincides with ours.
We did not particularly appreciate this break, so desired was the family reunion! Yet we can clearly say that there are more aspects of the book and the narration that we loved than those that we did not appreciate.
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Anita Likmeta, Le favole del comunismo, Marsilio, Venezia, 2024