Novel
Oh
Not translated into English
Anton Pashku · 1971
Synopsis
In a closed room, a man and a woman live beside an aquarium in which three fish swim. While the woman builds sandcastles, the man, who narrates, travels in dreams into the past and into an imagined future, as far back as Illyrian times, and an old man passes through the narrative. Without chronology or continuous plot, the novel links its narratives around betrayal, in a cold and endlessly contradictory dialogue between the couple.
Context
Published in 1971, the novel had a slow but strong influence on Albanian prose. Fatlum Meholli points out in 2021 its opening sentence of more than a hundred words and its circular construction; Xhelal Zejneli reads in it Albanian history as a painful cycle that repeats itself. Albanë Mehmetaj recalls that Sabri Hamiti and Kujtim Shala, among others, have studied its theme, its intertextuality and its structure.
Who it is for
For reading the major work of the founder of modern Albanian prose in Kosovo, without plot or chronology.
Prizes and reception
For Albanë Mehmetaj, in 2020, the work was misunderstood because of its form, which turns even explicit messages into a poetics.
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