Prison camps in Communist Albania were as brutal and claustrophobic as Stalin’s gulags, with the additional and unique horror that Albanian prisoners could be charged and re-sentenced while already in prison.  In this raw and moving memoir, the prize-winning writer Fatos Lubonja brilliantly evokes life for prisoners of the state as they struggled to cope with the physical and psychological deprivations of imprisonment. Second Sentence opens in 1978 with a vivid description of the author’s experiences as a forced laborer in a copper mine in Northern Albania.  In the tense camp atmosphere, Lubonja discovers that two of his co-prisoners have written a letter to the Party criticizing ""the foremost leader,"" Enver Hoxha. Shortly afterwards they are spirited away under mysterious circumstances.  Lubonja does not make the connection until he is himself re-arrested in the camp with seven others and sent to stand trial as part of an alleged counter-revolutionary organization. With heart-breaking honesty, Lubonja describes the long months of interrogation and solitary confinement as he awaits his second sentence. This is an extraordinary portrait of the impenetrable world of Communist Albania and an unforgettable memoir of friendship and betrayal.

Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag

History

Lubonja, Fatos

Europe

I.B.Tauris

After the world's most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and opened to capitalism, many people fell prey to fraudsters who invited them to invest in so-called "pyramid schemes." At the start of 1997, these pyramids crumbled one after another, causing widespread demonstrations and protests. The conflict became increasingly violent, leading to the collapse of the state and of the country's institutions. Prisons were opened, crowds stormed arms depots, and the country was abandoned to anarchy and gang rule. Lubonja has chosen to tell this incredible story through a narrative technique that operates on two levels: a third-person narrator, who describes the large-scale events that made international headlines, and the narrative of Fatos Qorri, the author's alter ego, who describes his own dramatic experiences in a personal diary. The book begins with the synopsis of a novel entitled The Sugar Boat that Fatos Qorri intends to write about the spread of a small pyramid scheme luring people to invest supposedly in a sugar business. However, as the major pyramids collapse, real events overtake anything he has imagined, and Fatos Qorri finds himself in the midst of a real-life tragedy.

False Apocalypse: From Stalinism to Capitalism

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Istros Books

<p>'Like a Prisoner' is a collection of eleven dramatic and moving stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the workcamps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devise increasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters in different stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners' back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.</p>

Like a Prisoner: Stories of Endurance

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Books by Lubonja, Fatos