by Luca Alvino, Minima & Moralia – September 5, 2024

To tell a good story, one must know the right words—sometimes the simplest, sometimes the most erudite. Through words, we give shape to ideas and transform sensations into knowledge. And difficult words are those that grant the story greater completeness, making it more credible, more faithful to reality—which is always layered and multifaceted—so as to reflect it precisely and faithfully in the reader’s experience. In Le favole del comunismo (The Fairy Tales of Communism), Anita Likmeta (recently published by Marsilio) begins with the invocation of words her child-narrator does not yet know—words she needs to describe the motion of a thin pane replacing the broken glass of a window, billowing in the wind on both sides: “One day I will learn the difficult words too. Words like ‘laconic,’ ‘concave,’ or ‘convex.’ But that will happen in another language. For now, in February 1996 […] I’m too young to say them even in Albanian.”

The novel traces the conditions that enabled the narrator (and along with her, the author) to escape a history of oppression and poverty, forging a path toward democracy and plenty: the exodus in 1997 from a civil-war–torn Albania to Italy, the promised land of prosperity just across the Adriatic’s 150 kilometers. I met Anita Likmeta in Viareggio last July, when her book received the 2024 Viareggio-Versilia International Prize. That evening, she bonded with a young girl roughly the age of her Ari in the novel—an instant, luminous connection. Anita wore an expression of profound gratitude toward Italy, which had welcomed her at age eleven and allowed her to study and become a successful entrepreneur. In her brief speech, reinterpreting the term slightly, she defined Italian democracy as a “making space”: the capacity to host those in difficulty—a truly democratic act when it occurs.

One of the book’s virtues is its illumination of a nation still little known to many of us, despite its proximity to Italy—both during the communist dictatorship and the tumultuous aftermath of its collapse, as the country awaited a new order. The narrative alternates between real events and the fairy tales propagated by the regime—hence the title, The Fairy Tales of Communism—in which Albania was portrayed as “the happiest of worlds,” betraying the absolute absence of freedom. Ari, the protagonist, is the child left with her grandparents in rural Albania by her mother. She desperately needs someone to tell her real fairy tales to help her grasp the overwhelming complexity that has abruptly invaded her young life: “The truth is, if my mother were here she would tell me a fairy tale. If someone told me a fairy tale I might fall asleep sooner, instead of wrestling with the darkness of the night until I collapse, exhausted. And if no one tells me a fairy tale tonight, I know that one day, when I have all the words I need, I will tell it myself.”

It circles back to knowledge—and specifically, the knowledge of words. Without all the words you need, the fairy tales you tell can be distorted, lacking credibility. Knowledge demands experience. “After all, I have no idea what a sail is because I have never seen the sea,” Ari says on the first page. Without having known freedom or happiness, fairy tales can invert these concepts and become grotesque. Hence, in the regime’s fairy tales, Albania becomes “the Land of the Eagles, the happiest of all countries.” And the injustices committed there are portrayed as the fault of those who rebelled against the regime’s laws—people who willingly removed themselves from the supposed order that guaranteed that happiness. Without having ever experienced happiness, one cannot imagine it—and just as one cannot imagine what a sail is without seeing the sea. The fact that the protagonist is a child is significant: she has never lived another kind of life, unlike her grandfather. She senses there is something wrong with how society is ordered through adult discourse, but she struggles to imagine anything different from the world she knows. When, finally, in 1997 at age eleven, Ari escapes to Italy with her mother, she is astonished by the utter absence of reference points. The first time she eats a warm chocolate croissant, she doesn’t even know its name (when her mother asks what she wants, she says she wants “that good smell”), nor does she understand the wave of pleasure hitting her palate—it seems almost metaphysical: “The chocolate felt as if it went straight to my brain, and I couldn’t hold back the tears: it was a beautiful summer evening and God is good.”

Strikingly, in the book’s final page, Ari returns to the “difficult words”—the very ones she could not yet speak at the beginning, even in her mother tongue: “At the donkeys’ midnight, all words will be granted to us, even the difficult ones, like ‘laconic,’ ‘concave,’ or ‘convex.’ Words we shamefully looked up in the dictionary when we were foreign children in a world overflowing with chocolate.” “At the donkeys’ midnight” refers to a moment on Christmas Eve when beasts are asked how they’ve been treated—and at that moment, donkeys are granted the gift of speech. They will be able to say things precisely as they are, because they have all the words at their disposal. And based on their testimony, their masters will be judged: “Some names will remain written in the tree of life, while others will be erased forever.”

What endures in History—with an uppercase H—is the testimony of the donkeys, spoken in that brief magical moment, but spoken well, using all the words exactly right. History, after all, is necessarily an approximation—but an approximation with the ambition to be as precise as possible.