The Loser

The first of Fatos Kongoli’s novels to be translated into English—and the first novel he wrote after a career as a mathematician in communist Albaina—The Loser evokes the terror, paranoia and despair of the communist experience in Albania through the person of Thesar Lumi, a young man from a dusty and remote town who finds himself caught up in the series of large and small tragedies of daily life in a dictatorial regime.

Lumi narrates his story, calling it a confessional—a recounting of the mistakes that led him to walk away from a chance to leave Albania for Italy. As a teenager, Lumi managed to enroll in high school, and then university, in the capital city Tirana. There, he is befriended by Ladi, a young boy whose family is in the ruling class of Albania. Out of his depths both socially and politically, Lumi also also harbors a potentially devastating secret:

And that’s how I was destined at that young age to learn that I belonged to a category of inferior beings or, as I imagined it at the time, to a category of mangy mongrels who are kicked around wherever they go. As pale as death itself, my father revealed to me in brief terms that I did in fact have an uncle. “Several months after you were born,” he explained, “your uncle, who was doing his military service, crossed over the border with two companions. He fled the country, was declared an enemy of the people and became a shame on our family. He no longer exists for any of us, not for you either. You need to hate him.”

Lumi soon begins to have an illicit affair with Ladi’s cousin, Sonia, and when they are discovered his secret comes back to haunt him. Expelled from the university and banished to his village, Lumi is sent to break up limestone in the cement factory. Increasingly drunk on raki and depressed, Lumi finds himself trapped in a world where people have little to do but fight over the detritus of their ruined lives, and where the only thing worse than the ever-present communist authorities are the thugs who share his favorite bar.

The Loser is a relentlessly bleak book. Each of the characters in the story are simultaneously trapped in a pattern of behavior which they cannot escape and by the machinery of a thuggish communist society. Kongoli skillfully captures the desperation of Lumi, and of Albanian society at the time, memorializing for us a world which is, thankfully, disappearing.

The Loser
By Fatos Kongoli
Seren Books (forthcoming in November)
220 pgs, £7.99