Albanian writer Fatos Kongoli was awarded France highest decoration Chevalier de Legion d’honneur.
“My country recognizes and expresses gratitude for your work. Your hard work, just like that of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn and Vasil Grossman, admirably describes not only the destruction, everyday life of individuals oppressed by the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, their decline, but at the same time, their dignity”, said Ambassador Daviet in her speech. She also added that Kongoli’s books translated in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian introduced the world to the Albanian gulag but also to Albanian dignity and honor.
The ceremony was attended by the writer’s very close friends and by Prime Minister Sali Berisha as well, who addressed the group in French mentioning some early memories with Kongoli. The ceremony was attended also by the Minister of Culture, Ferdinand Xhaferri, Deputy Minister Suzana Turku, Edmond Tupja who has translated all Kongoli’s work into French and Kongoli’s Albanian editor, Fatmir To詠director of “Toena” publishing house.
In his speech, nostalgic Kongoli narrated how his life was linked to France, since an early age when he first learned French and then read everything he could of French literature.
The Lꨩon d’honneur is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte in1802. The Order is the highest decoration in France and is divided into five various degrees: Chevalier (Knight), Officier (Officer), Commandeur (Commander), Grand Officier (Grand Officer) and Grand’Croix (Grand Cross).
Fatos Kongoli (born 1944) is 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, he devoted his creative energies at the time to an 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 marvelous 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 who all hope is too late, abandons his companions, disembarks and walks home. “I returned to my neighborhood 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 fildisht묠Tirana 1999 (The Ivory Dragon), which focuses primarily on the life of an Albanian student in China in the 1960s; and L쬵ra e qenit, Tirana 2003, a tale of love and forgotten affections. Kongoli’s novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, Greek and Slovak.
