Chronicle in Stone
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Set just before and during the Second World War, Chronicle in Stone is a tale told by an imaginative young boy whose magical view of life tempers the tragedies that befall his family and neighbours as their city is battered by wave upon wave of occupying forces: first the Italians, then the Greeks, and finally the Germans. The joys and horrors of the modern world descending upon an ancient land are recounted with the beauty and simplicity that mark Ismail Kadare as one of the world’s foremost storytellers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Albania, that remote, unknown land, has found its voice in the novels of Kadare. In this one, the first of a forthcoming series, he takes as his subject the shattering impact of World War II as that cataclysm is lived by a small, immensely sensitive boy. After centuries of bondage to the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, Albania falls to the invading Italian fascists, then the Greeks, the Italians again, then the Nazi hordes. Amid floods, British bombing, the action of partisans, the boy undergoes another kind of turbulence, that of growing up, the inner and outer experience ringing strange harmonies. He responds to the beauty of unattainable women, to witchcraft, literature, and later, when he is evacuated from his "stone city'' to peasant and village life. Now his existence will be ``marvelous, terrifying and extraordinary.'' Instead, it is primitive, barbaric, a world where the severed arm of a British airman becomes a talisman and ``deflowered'' girls disappear, possibly murdered by their fathers. Kadare commands a tumultuous, whirling scene as he brings his homeland into the literary mainstream.
