Adelchi Battista, Writer, July 4, 2024

When I was introduced, more than twenty years ago, to this Albanian girl with strikingly pale blue eyes and scruffy, boyish blonde hair, I was told: “She’s the girl with a story.” As if she carried this sort of permanent appendage around with her—a burden she couldn’t shake off, a demon that followed her everywhere and always showed up, in every glance, every conversation, every interaction with her, always poking its nose in and causing trouble.

Anita Likmeta lived with this small shadow tucked just behind her left ear, and over the years—each time we crossed paths—her story would resurface, only to disappear again. During those long afternoons when I dictated my novel Io sono la guerra and she typed it for me as my typist, we often returned to the idea of her own story—hers, unlike mine, had been lived. It contained episodes that resisted narration, but also dazzling metaphors—about humanity’s engagement with political culture, with liberty and its counterfeits, with the disguises worn by truth, and with the logic of power and domination. It was, in a word, an emblematic story.

Now that I finally hold her novel in my hands, I understand it better: it wasn’t a single story, but many. Each one complete, each one resolved, and each one emblematic in its own way. Anita has since become a woman of a kind of pernicious beauty—yes, I mean intrusive, the kind that maybe caused her more than a few problems in life. I don’t know, I’m guessing. Some beauty feels too sharp to be safe—pardon the naivety. We saw each other again a few times, we exchanged letters, we talked a lot online—about life, the universe, and everything—always trying to rewind the thread (and threads) of her story. And finally she decided: she got to work and wrote this novel—if we can even call it that—in the best possible way. 

A child living through the collapse of communism in a place so geographically close, yet so mentally far from us: Albania. I’ve never been there. I know almost nothing about it. And I’m fascinated. It’s a place marked by wave after wave of invasions—Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Nazi-Fascist, Communist—each one leaving behind its trace. The people shaped by that history are something singular. Anita is the perfect example: a girl with distant Jewish roots, once leading a donkey to drink from a stream near her grandparents’ hut, who now speaks six languages and came to Italy on a migrant boat—only to become one of the 50 most influential women in the country.

In this frantic world we’re spinning in, where everything moves at light speed, I think there are still lessons to learn—at least from those who grew up without the luxury of choice. I count myself lucky to have encountered, for a time, that curious gaze of hers and her insatiable hunger for knowledge—qualities she has translated beautifully into these fables, reminiscent of Calvino.

All I can do is urge you to read Anita Likmeta. And maybe, finally, enter the age of discernment.