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The book 'Quarantine for one': Chronicle of a Kafkaesque trip

Politiko 2021-11-23 16:59:12
The book 'Quarantine for one': Chronicle of a Kafkaesque trip

Virgjil Muçi

Somewhere Plato has stated that it is not the author who selects his book, but it is the latter, that is, the book that, thanks to a mysterious and logically inexplicable mechanism, goes and finds the author. This Platonic sentence, I think, goes well after Alfred Lela's stature and his latest journalistic essay, which bears the eloquent title "Quarantine for one". The paradox is that, because literary critics are by no means able to explain how much conjecture they raise, in the history of letters we have a host of examples that prove that some of the works written in times of dictatorships and hermetic closures when the individual is deprived of physical freedom and to that which remains only the spiritual one, writers have produced accomplished works, ashes that leave traces in the collective consciousness and are remembered for a long time.

The book comes as an intimate as well as a universal narrative against the backdrop of two great tragedies for the author. Intimate because it relates to the severe illness of the most beloved man, his mother, and universal because it describes the tragedy of Covid-19 (ironically the author compares this creepy name with that of a play station game), the tragedy that has affected all of humanity. In the ongoing reading of this special book for the Albanian book library, both the first - the intimate - and the second - the universal - come and melt into a single and inseparable pain, making it even more tangible and close to the reader, as it can seldom seem in our temporary existence of this world, when great conflicts are experienced, such as wars,

The book is built in two parts: the first part contains a 14-day diary, while the second is entitled Meditation and summarizes a cycle of writings that permeates as a leitmotif the atmosphere created by the coronavirus. The diary goes on and on on the 14th Day, as a quarantine ends and the event continues with the author leaving Italy, the place where he is due to his mother's illness and her hospitalization in northern Italy, and the journey with Air Albania towards that place that we Albanians call Albania, to raise the bar of Albanian Reflections. At this point the naive reader - readers are generally naive because they believe everything the author says, whoever they are - can create the illusion or falsity, as the author likes to put it - that upon arrival in the homeland you escaped the plague of the coronavirus - for the sake of truth, heavier than what inspired Camus to write his famous book -, thanks to the popular tradition of garlic and brandy the cauldron, but also the vaccines against TB with which communism did not require us to immunize Albanians as a rarity on the planet. But by flipping through Lela's Reflections one by one, you as a reader realize that all of this is just a fad, like so much in this blessed place.

With a few quick brushstrokes with a safe hand thanks to the observant sharpness of the experienced journalist's eye, Lela gives us the complexity of life in the cities of Northern Italy, where he is meanwhile at the height of the pandemic, though the same surreal landscape prevails everywhere in Europe. And here you have no way to disagree with the author when he says: "Overnight the European Union has become the Union of Quarantine". On observation and then during the writing process, it seems clear that the author is clinging to the clothes of a journalist and even more so that of a chronicler. Then he moves without being forced to another register, that of the writer and through reflections and literary tropes, quite found I have to say not without a dose of envy, as well as the irony of humor stronger than Albanian, the writer penetrates and goes beyond the facade, beyond the wall of silence to explore what is inherent, what happens to people locked behind the doors of apartments (or should not be said, behind the doors of fear ?!), who is going to be their destiny and what awaits them in the future, a time dimension is already forgotten, given that for the moment only the present matters, the survivors. In this Dantesque scenario that surrounds the author in Above Hell, the author's eye does not escape the presence of Russian military trucks. The "liberation" boot of the Russian soldier who did not invade Italy at the end of World War II, now arrives in Dante's homeland with a humanitarian mission, an EU member state that resembles the beginnings and abandoned by the allies in this woe, offering us a Lectio magistralis in geopolitics; geopolitics will not know from the pandemic,  

Although written in monstrous times, when Death seems to have turned Life upside down and the latter without the help of men has lost its compass and blindfolds like an incestuous and murderous Oedipus, this book is a hymn to love; in the first place for the love of the dearest man, the Mother, the creator of life, but also the love for Humanity along with its pros and cons, defects and injustices. But, after all, are not all these flaws pushing us towards self-perfection in our unstoppable quest to equal our Gods, both those on Earth and in Heaven?

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