Short stories
Netë shqiptare
Not translated into English
Mitrush Kuteli · 1938
Synopsis
Eight stories of village life around Pogradec, on the shore of Lake Ohrid, where the author spent his childhood. They owe more to memory than to plot: their material comes from his own past, a critic of the Albanian exile called them lyrical, and their author himself called them his early works. The storyteller returns in them to the houses and people of his native land, seen from Romania, where he is living at the time, the country where his father, a tailor, had spent twenty-four years of his life.
Context
The tales had first appeared, about ten years earlier, in the Albanian weekly of Romania that their author edited. Collected in 1938, they form his first book; he regarded them as youthful essays, the later ones having been written with more craft. Most of the first print run was destroyed by a fire, and the book was widely read only from its second edition, in 1944. Studies link his prose to ballads, songs and folk tales, which he rewrites while keeping the essentials of the stories, with a narrator who intervenes and comments.
Who it is for
Short stories, in a language close to speech, which can be read without knowing anything beforehand; no French translation of the collection.
Prizes and reception
First book of an author whom critics regard as the founder of the Albanian school of narrative.