Fatos KONGOLI
BIOGRAPHY
Fatos Kongoli (b. 1944) has recently become one of the most
forceful and convincing representatives of contemporary Albanian
prose. He was born and raised in Elbasan and studied mathematics
in China during the tense years of the Sino-Albanian alliance.
Kongoli chose not to publish any major works during the dictatorship.
Rather than this, he devoted his creative energies at the time
to an obscure and apolitical career as a mathematician, and waited
for the storm to pass. His narrative talent and individual style
only really emerged, at any rate, in the nineties, since the
fall of the communist dictatorship.
His first major novel, I humburi, Tirana 1992 (The
Loser), is set in March 1991, when over 10,000 refugees scrambled
onto a decrepit and heavily rusting freighter to escape the past
and to reach the marvellous West. There they washed up, unwanted,
on the shores of southern Italy. At the last moment before setting
sail, protagonist Thesar Lumi, the 'loser' for whom all hope
is too late, abandons his companions, disembarks and walks home.
"I returned to my neighbourhood at the nightfall. No one
had seen me leave and no one saw me come back." The narrative
of the novel returns at this point to the long and numbing years
of the Hoxha dictatorship to revive the climate of terror and
universal despair which characterized day-to-day life in Albania
in the sixties and seventies. Thesar Lumi was born on the banks
of a river (Alb. lumi) in the looming shadow of the people's
own cement factory, which produced more dust than it ever did
cement. Despite a skeleton in the family closet, an uncle who
had earlier fled the country, Thesar manages to get himself registered
at the university, and penetrates briefly into a milieu which
is not his own and never will be, that of the ruling families
of Albania's red aristocracy. "At a tender age I learned
that I belonged to an inferior race or, as I saw things at the
time, to a category of mangy dogs to be kicked about and chased
away." Thesar, whose fate in Albania's hermetic and suffocating
society has been sealed once and for all, returns to live a life
of futility and despair in a universe with no heroes. Far from
the active protagonist struggling to control of his own destiny
or even from the staid positive hero of socialist realism, Thesar
Lumi is incapable of action and incapable of living. He is the
voice of all the 'losers' who glimpse the silver clouds on the
horizon and know full well that they will never reach them. "My
existence is that of the mediocre, setting out from nothing and
going nowhere." When first published in 1992, in what was
a comparatively large edition of 10,000 copies, the novel found
immediate success among the reading public. Who could not identify
with the confessional monologue and the unending tribulations
and torment of Thesar Lumi?
Among Kongoli's subsequent novels are: Kufoma, Tirana
1994 (The Corpse), the story of another loser caught up in the
inhumane machinery of the last decade of the Stalinist dictatorship
in Albania; Dragoi i fildishtë, Tirana 1999 (The
Ivory Dragon), which focusses primarily on the life of an Albanian
student in China in the 1960s; and Lëkura e qenit,
Tirana 2003, a tale of love and forgotten affections. Kongoli's
novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Greek
and Slovak. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Albania (late 20th - 21st centuries)
