Like a Prisoner
Stories of Endurance
Published on 15. September 2022
Book
Paperback/Softback
180 pages
978-1-912545-85-8 (ISBN)
Description
The book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance.
The characters inndifferent stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners' back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.
The characters inndifferent stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners' back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.
Reviews / Votes
Lubonja's telling of the events are gripping, and we learn that below any surface visible to outsiders, there was an intelligentsia, silenced by covert violence. If only their voice could have been heard and supported, how very different Albania would be today; Cental and Eastern European Review; The cinematic effect of Lubonja's description is enhanced by his narrative deivces... In setting himself the task of exposing vested interests and corruption, Fatos Lubonja show's that Albania still needs people of his intellectual and moral calibre;Times Literary SupplementMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Bristol
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
277 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-912545-85-8 (9781912545858)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
09/2022
Istros Books
€5.49
Available for download
Persons
Fatos Lubonja is a writer and editor of the quarterly journal Perpjekja [Endeavor], a representative of the Forum for Democracy, and a leading figure in Albania's political life. At twenty three, Lubonja was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for "agitation and propaganda" after police found his diaries, which contained criticisms of Enver Hoxha. He was later re- sentenced without trail and spent a total of 17 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. He was released in 1991. Lubonja's first book in English, Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag, was published to great acclaim by I. B. Tauris (2006) followed by False Apocalypse (Istros, 2015). Among his many literary prizes, he received the Alberto Moravia Prize for International Literature in 2002 and the Herder Prize for Literature in 2004 and the Prince Claus Award, 2015.