The Country Where No One Ever Dies

I’m terrible about starting book clubs and reading challenges and never finishing them. But the idea of a “reading around the world” challenge has been going around the internet for a few years and it really appeals to me. So the last time someone’s Reading Around the World book list popped up in my feed, I looked at it a little closer.

Albania

Albania comes between Afghanistan and Algeria in an alphabetical list of countries, and that’s the order I read through them. But I wrote about my Algerian pick before this one because in 2020, nothing goes according to plan.

Albania is another country I haven’t visited, but this time I do at least have some sort of connection with the country. When I was a kid, an Albanian family owned the pizza parlor down the street from my house. We ate there almost as often as we ate at home. They had a huge Mediterranean house in the desert; thrilling but obscure tales of escaping communists to get to America; and two cute boys close to my age. But their women always stayed at home unless the patriarch drove them somewhere. They were probably the first Muslims I ever met. I was kind of fascinated by them, and by extension, with Albania.

Ornela Vorpsi

Ismail Kadare seemed to be the go-to Albanian author, but I really wanted to read books by women whenever I could. So did some digging around online and found Ornela Vorpsi. Like both of the other authors I’ve read in this challenge so far, she has left her politically troubled Muslim homeland and writes from France. Like Djebar from Algeria, she is both a writer and a visual artist – Djebar is filmmaker and Vorpsi is a photographer.

The Country Where No On Ever Dies

It’s called a novel, but it reads like a collection of short stories. Except that the stories are all about the same family in Tirana, with a beautiful, high-strung mother, a political prisoner father, and an extended family convinced the child-narrator-protagonist will grow up to be a whore. The stories are not chronological, and the characters’ names and ages are different. But a longer narrative arc emerges anyway.

Conclusion

Whether it’s about one family or several families of a kind, each story (the whole story) is about sex. And death. And Mother Party. And all of these things are hostile.

Despite somewhat bludgeoning the reader with these heavy themes, the stories are delicately wrought, their power conveyed in tiny details that the childish narrator herself rarely understands. I admire the ability of authors to tell mature stories through innocent eyes. It’s like having both an omnicient narrator and an unreliable one, while also getting the extra layer of commentary on how kids think. (The Diary of Opal Whitely is another great example of this.)

But it doesn’t make me want to travel to Albania. In the end, after the grown girl and her mother have escaped to Italy, where things are not much better, she says

Finally, to get rid of their ulcers, they all go back to sunny Albania.
“It’s better here now,” they insist.

The Land Where No One Ever Dies, p. 109

And I’m sure it is. I would still like to see Albania someday, but I’m glad it won’t be the Albania where no one ever dies.

Details

The Country Where No One Ever Dies
Ornela Vorpsi
Translated from Albanian by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
Dalkey Archive Press
109 pages