Fatos Kongoli | The Loser
Translated by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
ISBN 978-1-85411-452-5
Seren Books, Bridgend, Wales, 2007
181 pp.
PREFACE
Fatos Kongoli (b. 1944) is one of the most forceful and convincing representatives of
contemporary Albanian literature. He was born in the central Albanian town of Elbasan and
raised in the capital, Tirana. As a young adult, during the tense years of the Sino-Albanian
alliance, he was sent to Red China to study mathematics. Kongoli chose not to publish any
major literary works during the oppressive dictatorship in his country. Instead, he devoted
his creative energies to a relatively obscure and apolitical career as a mathematician, and
waited for the storm to pass. There was, as he subsequently noted in an interview, "no
Marxist strategy for mathematics." His narrative talent and
individual style only really emerged, at any rate, in the nineties,
after the fall of the communist regime.
The novel "The Loser" (Alb. I humburi) takes the reader initially
back to a real event in March 1991 when, after almost half a
century of Stalinist rule, thousands of impoverished Albanians
clambered onto a rust-infested freighter which was anchored in
the port of Durrës and forced the crew to sail the vessel across
the Adriatic Sea to Italy. The scenes broadcast on television of
the arrival of the ship, teeming with refugees, were apocalyptic.
It seemed that everyone wanted to leave Albania and start a new
life elsewhere. The vast majority of Albanian refugees, after fifty years of total isolation, had
no idea what awaited them in the outside world, the fabled and marvellous West. It is to
these events in Albania's troubled history and, in particular, to the frightening decades in
communist Albania which preceded them that Fatos Kongoli alludes in this novel.
Yet The Loser is not a novel of emigration. At the last moment before his ship sets sail, the
book's protagonist, Thesar Lumi, the 'loser' for whom all hope is futile, abandons his
companions, disembarks and walks home. "I went back to my neighbourhood at nightfall.
No one had seen me leave and no one saw me come back." The novel returns at this point to
the long and numbing years of the Enver Hoxha dictatorship and revives the climate of
terror and universal despair that characterized day-to-day life in Albania in the sixties and
seventies. Thesar Lumi was born on the banks of a river (Alb. lumi) in the looming shadow of
the people's own cement factory, which produced more dust than it ever did cement. Despite
a skeleton in the family closet, an uncle who had earlier fled the country, Sari, as he is known
to his friends, manages to get himself registered at the university, and briefly penetrates a
milieu that is not his own and never will be - that of the ruling families of Albania's red
aristocracy. "I was destined at that young age to learn that I belonged to a category of inferior
beings or, as I imagined it at the time, to a category of mangy mongrels who are kicked
around wherever they go." Sari, whose fate in Albania's hermetic society has been sealed
once and for all by a daringly clandestine love affair, returns to live a life of futility in a
universe with no heroes. Far from the active protagonist struggling to control his destiny or
even from the staid but positive hero of socialist realism, Sari is incapable of action and
incapable of living. He is the voice of all the 'losers' who glimpse the silver clouds on the
horizon and know full well that they will never reach them. "It was my destiny to live a
banal, mediocre existence in the mud and filth of a little town, condemned to while away the
coming years amidst the suffering and tragedies of others."
When it was first published in 1992, in what for Albania was a comparatively large edition,
"The Loser" found immediate success among the reading public. There were few Albanians
who could not identify with the confessional monologue, the secret and doomed loves, and
the relentless psychological torment of Thesar Lumi. "The Loser" has been described as the
most important Albanian novel to emerge from the post-communist era.