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Fatos Kongoli. L'ombre de l'autre. Edmond Tupja, tr. Paris Rivages. 1998. 258 pages. 129 F. ISBN 2-7436-0360-7.
Readers who savored Fatos Kongoli's first novel translated into French, Le paume (1997; see "ET 71:4, p. 842), will be equally enthralled bv his second, L'ombre de l'autre, the French translation of Kufoma (The Corpse; Tirana, 1994), which has clear affinities with its predecessor, with respect both to Kongoli's now crystallized and somewhat more elaborate narrative style and to his innate preoccupations.
The novel's protagonist Festim Gurabardhi is another loser, caught up in the inhumane machinery of the last decade of the Stalinist dictatorship in Albania. As an orphan in the fifties he could never understand why his parents, killed in a car crash eight months after his birth, had given him the name Festim, meaning "feast" or "celebration." What was there to...