Kadare's Albania is a country of rain, mud and mountain silence, crossed twenty years after the war by an Italian general and a priest sent to recover their nation's dead. The map runs from the capital Tirana out through the northern highlands to old battlefields and a labourers' work camp, with the Adriatic coast and the port of Durrës always at the country's back.
Arrival
The story opens as an Italian general lands in the Albanian capital, twenty years after the war, charged with digging up the bones of his country's soldiers and carrying them home. Accompanied by a priest, he takes his instructions and his maps here before setting out into the country.
Opening chapters
explicitKadare names Tirana as the general's point of arrival; this marks the city centre.
The coast
Behind the whole expedition lies the Adriatic, the sea the dead soldiers once crossed to invade and by which the living now hope to ship them home. Durrës, the country's chief port a short way west of the capital, anchors that coastal edge of the map.
Coastal chapters
explicitThe Adriatic coast and its harbour frame the novel; this marks Durrës, Albania's main port, west of Tirana.
Into the mountains
The general and the priest drive north into the rain and mud of the highlands, moving between remote villages where the war left graves in the fields and memories that have not softened. Shkodër, at the foot of the northern mountains, stands for this stretch of the journey.
Mountain chapters
explicitKadare sends the search into the northern mountains; Shkodër marks the gateway to the northwestern highlands, though no single village is named as the route.
The old front
The pair work old battle sites scattered through the eastern mountains, matching regimental lists to bones pulled from the earth and puzzling over which unnamed hillside swallowed which lost company. The Kukës highlands stand in for these unnamed, remote fronts.
Mountain chapters
inspired byThe specific battlefields are never named in the novel; this marks the Kukës highlands of the northeast as a representative point among the remote wartime fronts the pair search.
The work camp
At one point the excavation halts at a camp of labourers set to turning over the ground, where the dry mechanics of counting and boxing the dead press hardest on the general's nerve. Kadare leaves the camp unplaced; the mountain country around Peshkopi stands for it.
Mountain chapters
inferredThe novel's work camp is not tied to a named village; this marks the Peshkopi area of the Dibër highlands as a representative mountain site where such digging would have gone on.