Crossing
Crossing Pajtim Statovci Translated by David Hackston Pantheon Books, New York, 2019 I like to think of myself as a fairly astute and close reader: I literally did not see the ending of this book coming. But once I read it I understood and wanted to immediately begin reading it again. Let me start at the beginning: Albania, a place so foreign and exotic that there is no category for it. It is a land that has been trampled over and over by foreign invaders and then largely left alone. Their language is quite like nowhere else. We traveled to Albania via a tourist bus from the small country of Montenegro. In Tirana we slipped away from the tour group. We had a contact of a diplomat, an attaché staying in the capital. Little did we know the little we knew. Albania had just emerged from a repressive regime on the scale of North Korea. Under their version of Kim Jong-un, Enver Hoxha erected a series of bunkers—in case the West invaded. They only wished. Albania was a...