Biografi: A Traveler's Tale

by Lloyd Jones

In 1991, with communism in tatters throughout Eastern Europe, Jones journeyed to a most unlikely Albania. What he found was a relentlessly bizarre world of half-truths and fictions, a world where your status and sometimes your life hinged on your biografi. Named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year. Map.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, History, Politics, Biography Memoir

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Lloyd Jones was born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, a place which has become a frequent setting and subject for his subsequent works of fiction. He studied at Victoria University, and has worked as a journalist and consultant as well as a writer. His recent novels are: Biografi (1993); Choo Woo (1998); Here At The End of the World We Learn to Dance (2002); Paint Your Wife (2004);and Mister Pip (2007). He is also the author of a collection of short stories, Swimming to Australia (1991).

In 2003, he published a children's picture book, Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer, and this was followed by Everything You Need to Know About the World by Simon Eliot (2004), a book for 9-14 year olds. He compiled Into the Field of Play: New Zealand Writers on the Theme of Sport (1992), and also wrote Last Saturday (1994), the book of an exhibition about New Zealand Saturdays, with photographs by Bruce Foster. The Book of Fame (2000), is his semi-fictional account of the 1905 All-Black tour, and was adapted for the stage by Carol Nixon in 2003.

Lloyd Jones won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize for his novel, Mister Pip (2007), set in Bougainville in the South Pacific, during the 1990s. He was also shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In the same year he undertook a Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.

Reviews

[Calzean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so well written that I thought was a travel documentary until I read the Afterword.
Jones visited Albania in 1991 and in his book he tells of the frightening country that had been produced during the 40-year reign of the country’s megalomaniac dictator Hoxha.
Every citizen had their own Biografi which documented everything the Government knew of them and whatever facts the secret police wanted to write regardless of the truth. Since the secret police needed enemies of the State they freely invented charges of treason, sedition, fraud or whatever to maintain their control of the populace.
When Hoxha died, Albania was an economic, social and political mess. A very scary book on what can happen.

[Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid fusion of travel memoir and exploration of culture/ Albania post-Hoxha. Having traveled in Albania certainly helped to put context and imagery into the reading. Most interesting was the quest to find and the history of one of Enver Hoxha's former body doubles.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

BIOGRAFI by Lloyd Jones is a interesting travelogue comprised of observations and conversations with Albanians who lived through the Communist era and regime of Enver Hoxha. Once unrest turned to demonstrations and to the overthrow of the communist stranglehold on Albania, ordinary citizens were now free and their biografis were to be destroyed. The problem I had with the book is the mixing of fact and fiction. After a while I didn't know what was true.

[Helena · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bizarre and fascinating mix of fact and fiction. I only picked this up because I read Mister Pip and figured it would be an obvious next step in my relationship with Mr. Jones. I'm not sure what motivates one to write about traveling to Albania in the early 1990s. Neither does Mr. Jones, obviously, who supplements his travelogue with the story of Petar Shapallo, a dentist forced to spend his life as a body double for Communist leader Enver Hoxha. The result is an indistinguishable blend of reality and fantasy that would set Oprah on the warpath.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, impressive, different--a New Zealander's take on Communist and Post-Communist Albania. Informative, frustrating, jumbled--a fever dream/nightmare of a book of a beleaguered people in a fallen country.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biografi is an extraordinary book. The narrative easily carried me along and i was captivated by Lloyd Jones's lovely prose. The 'controversy' in the afterword about fiction/non-fiction was hilarious, adding to my enjoyment.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has the writer really discovered the Albanian dictator's Enver Hoxha's double???

PS: I visited Albania during the last year of Hoxha's life.

[Floortje Zwigtman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atmospheric account of a voyage through 1990's Albania. The mix of fiction and non-fiction didn't bother me. Impressive post stamp portraits of historical figures, too.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Albania may be crazier than North Korea..

[Brett Hetherington · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is partly about a man who who had two lives. But first some background info helps...

When I was a curly-haired (and more ignorant) twelve year old in the Cold War years of the early 1980s, one day our History teacher asked the class a general knowledge question: “Who is the world’s longest-serving current dictator?”

Nobody had the correct answer, though Chairman Mao was one of the few responses from the students. Mr Lamb (yes, that was my teacher's name) gave us some helpful clues. “Come on now! He’s been in power since 1944 and he’s not from Asia.” But still, there was no idea running through the developing minds of those in the group. “It’s the Communist leader, Hoxha. Enver Hoxha in Albania,” he told us and wrote this strange sounding name on the board.

A decade and a half later (after French-educated Hoxha had been dead for almost ten years) I started to develop a morbid fascination with this country - a place the wider world knew little about. I read Paul Theroux’s harrowing account of a few weeks he spent travelling there and from a ferry leaving Greece I saw part of its coast: rough, dry and barren of buildings. I discovered that both Albania’s past, equally as much as its present, beggars belief and this pulled me into its orbit.

By the time Hoxha had been claimed by diabetes at the age of seventy six, his regime had modernised the economy in a classically Communist way: at a huge cost to the lives of its citizens. All across Albania, vicious historical blood feuds between families raged on and on unchecked and Hoxha’s secret police, the “sigourmi,” used networks of ordinary people as informers on their workmates and neighbours. Tens of thousands were jailed or disappeared (often in the kind of nightmarish circumstances that could come straight out of a Kafka story) and it’s estimated that up to twenty percent of the population were killed or died in forced labour.

When Hoxha’s supposed “worker’s paradise” came to an end there was a long, widespread orgy of general destruction of public property including factories. Combined with mass unemployment, severe shortages of food and fuel meant that the winter cold froze many people to death. Thousands of badly-needed professionals and working age men and women are still escaping to try to find work in neighbouring Greece or taking the short ferry to an often equally poverty-stricken existence in Italy. Some are going further away, including to Britain.

But Hoxha was paranoid. The parts I love most in Biografi are those that tell the story of Petar Shapallo, a dentist forced to be a body double for the Communist leader. The narrative is propelled by the author's search for the still living Shapallo and the bizarre details of his life-job makes Llyod Jones' work worth reading alone. Seemingly, some of this was fictionalised and the Afterward section suggests as much. To me, it rang true, could have been real...

[Part of this review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2016, under the title "Albania's Pain" here: https://bretthetherington.blogspot.co...]

[Sofie · Rating 3 out of 5]

History, mystery, biography, or fabrication? The Traveler is looking for Petar, a dentist whose previous face vanished under a surgeon's knife to function as Enver Hoxha's double. It's a very careful ... slow ... reading experience. Seems so different from everything else I have read by Jones. Rating it somewhere in the middle.

In the night something like a cold hand touched my cheek and I felt Albania reach out--a cold puff of wind sent down from those tan-coloured mountain peaks ... (20)

...he had described to Munz his wandering through the orange-scented groves, picking fruit off the ground, a man with a straight back who placed each foot delicately, as if trying to tiptoe away from his shadow. (32)

[Kari · Rating 3 out of 5]

The August prompt for #readtheworld21 was the Balkans; this "traveler's tale" from 1994 ventures into an Albania recently released from the grips of a Communist government. Our author and traveler, Jones, is a Kiwi who heard via an Albanian friend and neighbor rumor of a dentist forced into the role as body double to dictator Enver Hoxha. This resulting tale brings light to a place that was, at the time, incredibly isolated, thus leaving its people living in world of half truths and uncertainty. It's a hard reality to comprehend but one that is frighteningly common throughout history. An excellent portrait of a particular time and place; supposedly the more recent publications (I had a first edition) include an afterword that shed some new light on the story.

[Celeste · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book. And, I am so sad to say this because my very best friend gave it to me. The good: it gives an outsider's impression of Albania right after the fall of Communism. The bad: the writer gave a narrow impression of Albanians, the land, the culture, everything! The rich history before Communism was almost completely ignored. The geography was described quickly and provided no passion or appreciation for its beauty to the reader. But, the worst description was the Albanian people. He made them sound like odd characters who were largely ignorant. In 2019, the people I met in Albania were complex, smart, kind, enthusiastic, friendly, welcoming, and so much more. This book is such a sad representation of Albania.

[Jane E · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book that I have read in a long time. The bizarre tale of the dystopian mess that Albania became after the death on Hoxha and the fall (more or less) of Communism. Also, the story of the author's search for the man who was fixed up with training and a bit off plastic surgery to act as Hoxha's double. The double lived on after Hoxha's death and in due course the author tracked him down to hear more of the strange tale of his kidnap, transformation and gilded cage life from which there was no chance of escape. Absolutely fascinating, well written and a terrific portrait of a country falling to pieces. (Purchased at the Strand Bookstore, NY)

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

life in post communist country sounds horrible. Wondered if I could have written this about the Czech cities on the hockey tour...

[Sara]

As you can see from the read dates, I’ve really struggled to get into this book. I’ve started it at least four times and I’m giving up now.

[Alvin Rc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1994 novel BIOGRAFI by Lloyd Jones, the author of the wonderful Mister Pip, is an astonishing literary account of the author’s journey to Albania, a country, which according to him, was but an hour’s flight from Italy but another century removed from Europe. Jones’s visit to the terribly damaged country happened in 1991, six years after the death of Hoxha, when the country was still struggling to recover from the devastations Hoxha’s regime had inflicted. The narrative was woven around his search for Petar Shapallo, who, in the story, was a pathetic dentist who had a great resemblance to Hoxha, had been abducted from a remote village, had undergone plastic surgery, had been made to live as Hoxha’s body double and kept under house arrest, who had fled from certainty of death when the dictator died because he would be of no further use, and who had traveled the convalescing country to visit places from his past. When they finally met, the author/narrator joined the broken body double in the latter’s journey to the past as the former generously detailed his observations of the wreck – people and structures – left by the mad regime of Hoxha.

Biografi is a marvel.

[Elizabeth]

I wished I'd read the afterword before starting the book - it would have given me less of a sense of being cheated, and more appreciation for what was being done. All the same, I loved this book and can't believe that I'd lived in Albania for 6 years before I even knew of its existence. It feels like a very expert representation of the country in the 1990s and I learned a lot. There were a few irritating mistakes in the spelling of Albanian names or words which any Albanian could have corrected (to make it seem more accurate ;-)) and since one of the things that I love about Tirana is its wonderful climate almost all year round, it seemed very unfair that such a deep pall of cloud and cold hangs over the book. But those are quibbles!

[Michelle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up on this book about chapter 7. It started off ok: flash back narrative, jump to present tense, back story of interesting political characters, and then it all fell apart. Lots of pokey observations on the color of tunics and who ate what yogurt. Sigh. I had such hopes.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

ALBANIA

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very weird: a journey through Albania with Enver Hoxha's former stand-in.

[Sharon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Taking it to the used book store. It's too much of a chore to finish.