Novel
The Loser
I humburi
Fatos Kongoli · 1992
Synopsis
In March 1991, after the fall of the regime, Thesar Lumi tells his life. A few months earlier, he gave up at the last moment on leaving Albania on a boat for Italy with his friends. He looks back on a life of failures: Crazy Xhoda, the former headmaster of his childhood, an exiled uncle whose stain threatens his studies, the cement works, his affair with Sonia, an older widow from a privileged background, and the protection of Ladi, son of a high-ranking official.
Context
The novel appeared in Tirana in 1992, in a print run of ten thousand copies, and was an immediate success; it is the author's first major book, followed by Kufoma and Dragoi i fildishtë. Christiane Montécot and Edmond Tupja translated it into French as Le Paumé, for Rivages, in 1997; Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck translated it into English as The Loser, for Seren, in 2007. Critics compare its hero, who watches more than he acts, to Camus's Meursault.
Who it is for
To understand, through an ordinary man, what Enver Hoxha's dictatorship did to the Albanians who lived under it.
Prizes and reception
Amanda Hopkinson, in The Independent, counted it among the best novels published in the year of its English translation.