Book Review – China Revitalized Through Memory in the Novel “Ivory Dragon”, by Fatos Kongoli

Abstract

The subject of this novel takes shape and begins and elaborates on an event in the 90s, when Genci Skampa, a reporter in a daily newspaper, is invited to a meeting of journalists from the Balkan Peninsula in the capital of France, Paris. The events and destinies of the characters, who sometimes surrender to memory and sometimes return to objective reality, follow a trajectory that is not at all chronological, moving from Tirana, towards Beijing, then towards Paris and vice versa. However, the road remains one and only, and the main theme of this work is about the life of the Albanian student in Beijing during the 60s, of the last century, centred on the university corps of that city, where young people who came almost from prosperous communist countries world, they experience redemption and freedom for the first time, but this freedom remains conditioned under the unspeakable atmosphere for the mentality of these teenagers, that of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. At that time, i.e. in his student years, the young Albanian Genci Skampa met and fell in love with the elegant Chinese student, Sui Lin. In the chapters of this novel, all the deformations of living as well as the occasional contrasts are arranged somewhat carelessly: the permanent pressure exerted by the wild discipline, the silent temptations, but also the spiritual and psychological related disturbances that one experiences during the experience of first love. At the same time, some elements and phenomena make up a somewhat separate world, forged by events and people who leave behind indelible traces, imbued with pronounced notes of lyricism and drama at the same time, gradually transforming into shadows of the past that haunts the protagonist of this novel on his way back from Beijing to Tirana, but also that of his departure years later from Tirana to Paris, to crucify the main character forever in the memory. Keywords: love, Albanian, Chinese, student, memory.