by Annalisa de Simone, Linkiesta – May 22, 2024

Anita Likmeta makes an impressive debut with Marsilio through a coming-of-age novel full of grace and restraint, set amid the red Albania of her childhood, with an epilogue that brings everything into perspective. The Land of the Eagles is the happiest country there is. The Fairy Tales of the Land of the Eagles tells stories of houses sprouting like leaves, of donkeys, of apple trees, of cities floating in starry skies inhabited by extraterrestrials. Anita Likmeta, born in Albania under Enver Hoxha’s communist regime, interweaves the threads of her past in Le favole del comunismo (The Fairy Tales of Communism, Marsilio), crafting a narrative that casts our present into stark relief.
“Outside, the cold is biting. An angry cold. The steel barrels placed at the corners of the house overflow with rain that has beaten down for weeks.”

In the narrator’s village in Albania’s interior, water doesn’t flow from faucets; people wash with cups scooped from rain puddles. The year is 1996, and the child lives behind plastic tarps fluttering in broken window frames—windows that once had glass. The generator in Ari’s house, run on petrol, only lights dimly once in a while, courtesy of her grandfather. Across the Adriatic, in the West, the rule of law—flawed as it is—grants freedoms by birthright. Here, in Albania, these are communist fairy tales. The Western demon is stigmatized in local folklore—a secular testimony to a creed based on fear, coercion, and punishment—embodied in the amiable grin of Mike Bongiorno and his innocently ominous refrain: “Allegria!” The moral of these imposed bedtime fables is simple: “If you hear the word Allegria! and aren’t quick to turn your face away, cover your ears and lower your gaze, then doom will follow you and your family for a thousand generations.”

What emerges most powerfully from Likmeta’s sparse, first-person narration—stripped of adornment and elegantly precise—is a portrait of either fear or rage at injustice. There is no room for change; the dread that something might go horribly wrong looms on every page. “The truth is that if my mother were here, perhaps she would tell me a fairy tale.”

Ari’s mother, pregnant too young to work, left her with grandparents. Those invented legends—fairy tales—linger in a landscape of nostalgia and a painful hope that the mother, who left on the boat with so many others, will one day return. These stories also serve indoctrination, propagating myths in praise of the Party: “Look at Comrade Tahir!” the Party would say. “He has eight children but lives in abundance because he recognizes the Party’s reason. Those who recognize the Party’s reason have plentiful harvests and goats that produce milk. Those who recognize the Party’s reason always have eggs in the henhouse and flour for bread.”

But then reality intrudes in jarring contrast—women with frozen expressions wielding hoes, youths disappearing mysteriously, elderly people grinding their teeth as they dig. Until the day History turns, and Berlin is liberated: the swan song of Eastern regimes. In the Land of the Eagles, the happiest country of all, newspapers say nothing while the rest of the world debates its fate. Now life for Ari will never be the same. Enter Italy—and an instinctive refusal to feel nostalgic: “Nostalgia is for people without a heart who wish they had one.” In contrast to the monochrome world described so far, Milan bursts forth in color: glass windows, iPhones, Siri, Lana Del Rey, bathrooms the size of Ari’s childhood bedroom, a home kept immaculate, and the digital universe of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn—showers, even bathtubs.

“I don’t recall where I heard it: if everyone carried their own cross into the square, and if all those crosses were piled up, in the end each person would reclaim theirs.” True enough—everyone has their own suffering, their own fairy tales to ease the pain. And those who narrate others’ pain inevitably create limited worlds. But what Likmeta reveals through the innocent eyes of young Ari—and the lucid vision of the woman she will become—is that beyond our personal horizons of hope and betrayal lies a grand, objective, universal, historical panorama. One that cannot be relativized. We often criticize the West—because we are permitted to do so, because it is our right—but to recalibrate our judgment, we need only stretch our perspective slightly. And then that simple taxi ride home, through Milan’s incandescent streets—where night seems day—within this novel full of grace and restraint, transforms from an ordinary gesture into the heroic fulfillment of Ari’s journey.