Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that makes its own ground; told through a child’s consciousness, the novel explores the life of a city prior to and during World War II. But describing it in that way tells you nothing about the book, which is about the life of the city as much as it is the life of the child, and about many of the specific people in the city, and the pattern of life in the city, and the legends of the city, and the history… One of those books that does something not quite like anything else I’ve read. It reminded me of magical realism, though I think that’s a tired term; the book echoed fairy-tale atmosphere, but the magic in it intersects with the real history of the Italian, Greek, and German invasions of Albania, grounding the fantasy-feeling into the harsh reality of warfare. The writing is full of concise, aphoristic sentences that I read two or three times before moving on, savoring them, letting the thoughts sit in my head, enlarging. It’s that kind of prose, the words linger. But there is nothing heavy-handed or strained; the whole book feels effortless. A bit of magic. The edition of the book I read had a couple of cover-quotes that talked about the primitivity of Albania, which was curious since the word would never had occurred to me in relation to the book. The novel simply chronicled the life of the stone city that still feels, as I think about it, as if it has stood on its mountainside forever, and still stands there, in spite of everything.