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Sanctioned Criticism
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13033 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1995 |
2,089 Words |
| Author
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Barry Baldwin
Barry Baldwin is professor in the Department of Classics at
the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta. |
THIKAT
(The knives)
Neshat Tozaj
Tirana: Naim Frash‘ri, 1989
261 pp.
According to the London Sunday Times (December 17, 1989), "Albanians queued to buy an unlikely best-seller last week: a denunciation of the hated Sigurimi, the secret police, by a former interior ministry official." Even more unusual, the author, Neshat Tozaj, "received warm reviews from the state press instead of the customary knock on the door in the middle of the night."
This news was a bit belated: Thikat (The knives) had actually appeared in July 1989. Its publication was a shadowy event, for a time even dubious; first efforts to obtain a copy from Tirana were in vain. As it turned out, this was inefficiency rather than suppression. Two years later, a French version was published in Paris. Overseen by Tozaj himself, it contains an introduction by the inevitable Ismail Kadare. The French blurb proclaimed that this was the book that had awakened Albania, the novel that had lit the fuse under the dictatorship.
Few novelists (Charles Dickens being perhaps the conspicuous exception) have really changed their own countries, let alone the world. Albania's communist regime would collapse within three years, in a relatively bloodless way compared to Romania. But Thikat struck no significant blow, let alone the fatal one.
Tozaj was born in 1943. After university studies (a sure sign of
... (1995 of 12825 Characters)
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