Chronicle in Stone

A boy watches his ancient stone city on its mountainside change hands again and again, Italians, Greeks, Italians, Greeks, Germans, in the chaos of the Second World War. Kadare's own Gjirokastër is the whole book: the steep grey stone houses with their cisterns and slate roofs, the castle brooding over the town, the aerodrome the Italians cut into the plain below, and the old bazaar where the city's life and rumour churn.

The boy

The stone house

Chapter 1

From the deep, cool rooms of the family's stone house, its cistern in the cellar and its many-eyed windows, the boy takes in a world half real and half magical. The house, seemingly alive, is the fixed point from which he watches his city endure bombing, occupation and the strange comedy of war.

The main narrative

explicit The boy narrator's home is one of the tall grey stone houses of Gjirokastër, with its cistern and slate roof; such houses, and the real UNESCO 'city of stone', are the ground of the whole book.

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