Ismail Kadare - Kronikë në gur

Description

With its flavour, tone, and spectacular events reminiscent of an ancient epic, Chronicle in Stone is probably the funniest, and at the same time, most tragic of Kadare’s novels, depicting a world in which people believe in black magic, women live to be a hundred and fifty, and girls are drowned in wells by their families for having kissed a boy. Its characters, the folklore and mythology infusing historical circumstances are reminiscent of some Caribbean novelists or even post-colonial African storytellers, and one cannot help compare its blend of surreal situations and political drama based on real events to South American novels, although Kadare apparently dislikes the label “magical realism” applied to his novels. It is not hard to imagine why: as some South American novelists have said, he too could say that the world he describes is not “surreal” or “magical-realist”; it is simply the real, pre-modern world of the Balkans, albeit a world which is universalized through esthetic transfiguration.