A Short Border Handbook: A Journey Through the Immigrant's Labyrinth - Paperback

by Gazmend Kapllani (Author), Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife (Translator)

A Short Border Handbook is a cogent and comical journey into the depths of dictatorship, migration, and borders from an Albanian who grew up in Enver Hoxha's Stalinist madhouse, longing for the West, only to find yet more visible and invisible borders on his arrival.

After spending his childhood in Stalinist Albania during the Cold War, and fantasizing about life across the border, the unnamed protagonist (based closely on the author) flees to Greece, the only country in the Balkans that belonged to the "Western bloc"⎯only to get banged up in a detention center. As he and his fellow immigrants try to make sense of the new world, they find jobs and plan their future lives in Greece, imagining success that is always beyond their grasp. The sheer absurdity of both their plans and their new lives is overwhelming. In a narrative both ironic and emotional, Kapllani interweaves the story of his experience with meditations upon "border syndrome"⎯a mental state, as much as a geographical experience⎯to create a brilliantly observed, amusing, and perceptive debut. And an ever timely one at that.

Front Jacket

An exhilarating and blackly comical exploration of immigration from an Albanian who grew up in a totalitarian madhouse, longing for Greece, where he found more absurdities⎯and who eventually settled in the United States

"Kapllani treats the absurdities of nationalism in the Balkans⎯and everywhere⎯with mischief, wit and insight." ⎯Independent
"One of this book's pleasures is the author's honesty, but one of its shocks is that it exposes an everyman's struggle for dignity. We think of walls and borders as something either in the past or in the Middle East. Kapllani brings borders closer to home." ⎯Guardian
"A telling reminder of how the borders that many of us are lucky enough to regard as bureaucratic inconvenience often form unimpeachable barriers and of how the way they are policed can be ruthless and absurd." ⎯Irish Times
"As a student of borders, I was fascinated by this meditation by a wise Albanian of what it means to be an immigrant. With great insight, through his personal story, Kapllani has enabled us far better to understand and enter into this overwhelming problem of our times." ⎯Peter Stansky, author of Edward Upward, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

Author Biography

Gazmend Kapllani, the author of three books, teaches creative writing and European history at Emerson College and was previously a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and a writer-in-residence at Wellesley College. He has held talks at numerous colleges and universities including the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and Bennington College. Born in 1967 in Albania, he crossed the mountainous border into Greece illegally, on foot, in 1991. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook, and a kiosk attendant while earning a doctorate at Athens University. For more than ten years he was a columnist for the leading Greek daily Ta Nea. A Short Border Handbook, written in Greek, was a bestseller in Greece and translated into several languages. In 2017 it received the prestigious Italy's Letterature dal Fronte (Literature from the Borders) Prize of Cassino, Italy, dedicated to Greek literature for the year. Kapllani's other books include the novels My Name is Europe (2010, Greece; 2013, France) and The Last Page (2012, Greece; 2015, France). He is currently working on a novel in Albanian and a short story collection in English.