Misinterpretation, Ledia Xhoga
In this compelling debut novel from Ledia Xhoga, nothing happens, and a lot happens. Following a nameless protagonist, an Albanian translator who lives in New York City with her husband, Billy, the story begins with a job she isn’t suited for and which remains inconclusive. While the narrator goes through some of the worst turmoil of her life, the reader is held at arm’s length and refused access into her deepest thoughts, just like everyone else in her life.
What Xhoga excels at is pacing. The novel is tightly woven, hopping from New York to Tirana, from apartment to therapist’s office, with a smoothness one might associate with dissociation. Certainly, events follow each other in staccato, and yet none of the established plot threads are finished. What remains is open-ended, the kind of realism that has become popular among writers of contemporary literary fiction, and which is difficult to pull off – after all, it is by design unsatisfying to read.
It is, nonetheless, engaging to read between the lines of Xhoga’s work, particularly the passages in which she travels to visit her family in Tirana. Her mother, an agoraphobe, is difficult to coax out of the house and apathetic towards the dinners offered by the narrator, preferring her own home-cooked fodder. The city comes alive under Xhoga’s caring craft; filled with elderly street-sellers and teenagers skipping school, set between castle and river, the legacy of history feels built into the foundations of the Tirana Xhoga describes. This legacy, of course, is not all charming. Woven into the visit is the unwavering frustration felt by the narrator towards her traumatised mother, and there is an unspoken grief that binds them all together built off the back of a history they don’t discuss.
This grief infiltrates the protagonist’s life back home. A friendship with an old client, Alfred, who was a survivor of Kosovar torture, is severed early by a therapist who realises that Alfred’s traumas are triggering for the narrator, too. Her marriage is unstable, Billy uncommunicative and angry. One friend is being stalked by her husband’s cousin; another is in love with Billy. In the middle of all life’s difficulties, it is palpable how often the narrator is barely keeping her head above water. Nobody wholly at fault, it is life itself that keeps knocking her back whenever she thinks she sees an exit.
A charming debut which shows off Xhoga’s potential, with an emotional heart at the centre of a tumultuous world. Don’t expect satisfaction, but expect to feel something.
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