The Country Where No One Ever Dies (Eastern European Literature Series) [Paperback]

Ornela Vorpsi (Author), Robert Elsie (Translator), Janice Mathie-Heck (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Eastern European Literature Series | Publication Date: November 17, 2009

The spare, unsentimental first novel by an extraordinary new voice in world literature.

A young girl’s father is constantly forcing her to kiss him, and her aunt predicts that she will grow up to be a whore. With Albania’s communist regime crumbling around them, sex, dictatorship, and death are inescapable subjects for the girl and her family—though the protagonist of The Country Where No One Ever Dies always confronts the ridiculousness of her often brutal reality with unflappable irony and a peculiar kind of common sense. Her name and age changing from moment to moment, she is an unforgettable portrait of the imagination under siege, while The Country Where No One Ever Dies is itself a one-of-a-kind atlas to a land where black comedy is simply a way of life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This slender sendup of life in rural Albania under the Communist regime offers a hilarious look into a simple, uneducated people's mores and passionate natures. Narrated by a girl who lives with her beautiful, unhappy mother while her father is imprisoned for absurd political reasons, the punchy vignettes treat aspects of village life that center on a sunny lassitude and a preoccupation with ensuring a girl preserves her immaculate flower; the local school, where the narrator is punished by her zealous Communist teacher; the sad fates of neighbors; and the narrator's uneasy relationship with her absent father, whom she recalls as brutal and a slobbering kisser (Why did I bother giving you life if I can't even give you a kiss?). Books offer her the prospect of escape, and our intrepid protagonist procures them by offering a venal elementary school teacher her mother's jewelry in exchange for access to the great stockpile of dreams. Vorpsi cleverly melds old wives' tales, a child's naïveté and sharp-edged irony for a not-so-gentle skewering of her homeland. (Nov.)
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Review

Filled with poetic and gracious sentences. . . . Read her, this novel is delightful. (Le Figaro Magazine )

Both ironic and lucid, Ornela Vorpsi’s prose is as lively as she is. (Le Monde )

Ornela Vorpsi’s unforgettable first novel pulses with an undercurrent of black energy, thick with sarcasm, cynicism, and, in the end, a recognizably tender and wounded humanity. (Josh Maday - The Collagist )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive; Original edition (November 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564785688
• ISBN-13: 978-1564785688
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A bitter portrait of Albania, January 6, 2010

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R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Country Where No One Ever Dies (Eastern European Literature Series) (Paperback)

Ornela Vorpsi was born in Tirana, Albania in 1968. She moved from there to Italy in 1989, then on to Paris, and she now lives in Berlin. She has commanded some notice in contemporary hip Europe as a writer, photographer, painter, and video artist.

THE COUNTRY WHERE NO ONE EVER DIES was published in Italian in 2005. It is, I suppose, a novella (109 pages). It consists of 15 chapters, each of which contains a separate scene or vignette from the life of an Albanian girl, told in the first person. In the last, she and her mother move from Tirana to Italy. The girl is variously referred to as Ormira, Ina, Eva, and Ornela. My guess is that the book is roughly autobiographical.

The writing is brisk, irreverent, salacious, sardonic, and a little arrogant. In the novella, Vorpsi heaps scorn on the Communist Party that ruled Albania until 1992 and, to a large extent, on Albanians as well. The author's disdainful attitude towards her native country is reflected in her dedication: "I would like to dedicate this book to the word `humility,' which does not exist in the Albanian lexicon. Its absence can give rise to some rather curious phenomena in the destiny of a nation."

"The country where no one ever dies" turns out to be Albania. The epithet is not logical; you need to read the novella to grasp its rather perverse sense. But I am not sure it's worth the effort. Vorpsi is understandably bitter towards her homeland, but THE COUNTRY WHERE NO ONE EVER DIES does not transcend either that bitterness or Albania, nor does it achieve the status of literature -- as does the work of another Albanian, Ismail Kadare.