Twenty-seven years ago, the only Maoist dictatorship in Europe fell, along with its dictator, Enver Hoxha, who was killed along with his wife in the revolution. Today, most people, if they know of Albania at all, only know of it because of the Balkan war of the 1990s that pitted ethnic Albanians against Serbs. The name of Enver Hoxha is mostly unknown in the West. But in Albania, they remember him. Hoxa's Albania was country that made East Germany look generous and friendly. Each citizen's life was controlled by what what in their Biografi, which was the official dossier of information kept on every citizen from birth. WIthout a good biografi, an education, a job, or what passed for a normal life in Albania was impossible. For some, it was impossible even with a proper biography. One such man was Petar Shapalo, a dentist who had the misfortunate to have a face that was a very good likeness of that of Envar Hoxa's, a likeness that would cost him his own life.
One day, agents of the government came to Shapallo's office and told him he would have to leave with them. He was not told why, or allowed to contact his family. In Albania, you did not ask too many questions. Shapallo learned that he has to be one of Envar Hoxa's doubles, men who would stand in for him when the ruler was ill, disposed, at risk of assassination, or simply did not want to be bothered. And from then on, until the death of Hoxa, that was Shapallo's life. When Hoxa was ill, and lost weight, Shapallo lost weight. When he gained weight, Shapallo gained weight. This was Shapallo's life until that day in 1985, when he escaped in order to avoid his own assassination at the hands of the security forces. He made his way back home where he discovered that almost all traces of his former lifer were gone, his family taken away by the security police, his life erased.
A most moving, and troubling story, and one, it turns out, that was entirely fictional. Author Lloyd Jones admitted around 2007 that while his search for Shapallo was a real one, motivated by rumors of the man, the story he penned was a novel, an allegory, intended to give the reader a sense of what life was actually like in Albania during the Hoxa years, and the publisher acknowledges this in the latest edition. So how should we read it? Is it fraud, or is it a novel? Whatever it is, it's very good. Jones did travel in Albania, he did go looking for Shapallo, and he did write about the people he encountered, and their reticence, almost a decade after the fall of Hoxa, to talk about what life had been like in those years. The picture Jones paints of Albania, and of Shapallo's life, puts me very much in mind of some of Orwell's writing- the lives of the miners in The Road to Wigan Pier, and the lives of pretty much everyone in 1984. Fraud or not, it's still superbly written and perhaps a more vivid picture of life under Hoxa than even a real biografi could provide.
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