Content
The Deathers, novel, Pogradec 1988 /
Bucharest 2020 [Mortët, roman, SQ]
A Glorious and Dying Tribe – The Saga of an Oblivion, Bucharest 1998 / 2024 [Un trib glorios și muribund – eposul unei uitări, RO]
The Rivers of the Sahara, novel, Tirana 1986 / Bucharest 1994 [Lumenjtë e Saharasë, roman, SQ]
Home, novel [Bucharest, 2005, SQ]
Incógnito, novel, Bucharest 2015 [Incógnito, roman, SQ]
The Prompter’s Exodus – streodrama, Bucharest 2022 [Exodul sufleurilor – sterodramă, RO]
You and other stories, Prose (1997-2020)
Eye/s / Ojo, novel, ES – Bucharest 2003 [Sy, roman, SQ]
Father / El padre, ES – Bucharest 2003 [Ati, roman, SQ]
The year in which the swan was invented, novel, Bucharest 1996 [Anul în care s-a inventat lebăda, RO]
Ex – novel with love & conspiracy, novel, Bucharest 2008 [Ex – roman de dragoste & conspiraţie, RO]
Empatycon or The Book of Premature Life, novel, Bucharest 2007 [Empatycon sau Cartea Vieții Premature, RO]
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The Deathers, novel, Pogradec 1988 / Bucharest 2020 [Mortët, roman, SQ]
The powerful Morti family suddenly shuts itself off at
home, convincing the city that they have left the country (Albania). The
reasons for their escape are unknown. A strange life passes by, mixing epochs
and beings, between the walls. The novel was written in 1988. The word
"Mort" in Albanian has several meanings: the dead people, the process of honoring the dead, burial, death.
A Glorious and Dying Tribe – The Saga of an Oblivion, Bucharest 1998 / 2024 [Un trib glorios și muribund – eposul unei uitări, RO]
“It is an honor for our literature that this total novel, with a Marquezian scope, exists in the Romanian language. If in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude the life of a Latin American family over the course of a century is depicted, in the epic being launched today – without being a replica – the life of Balkania over the span of a millennium is portrayed in multiple layers. [Vasile Andru, Bookfest 2005]
In August 1998, after I read the first appearance of the “Tribe…”, a famous Romanian critic told me that, due to such a book, the Romanian culture should be firing its canons. The official ones actually did it, but her canons had silence instead of powder. Of course, my happiness that I was given to write the “Tribe…” plenary overcomes any praise, reward or good criticism. It was then that I understood the role of this strange relation between a certain literary value and the officials. It is something like: the diamond has been given to me, they insist not to honor me with a hand of coals. It is better to be alive and considered dead, than vice versa. From a certain point of this post vitam, the fate of this epopeea has left me behind or in shadow, but, on the other hand, I didn't want it any other way. It is enough for the avid reader to follow, in the book, the unpredictable relation of the Balkan entity with the Oriental or the Occidental, the desert games as a geographical and metaphorical space, the tools that produce and distort myths, realities – “live flesh” from which the great literature incarnates itself; the blind soldiers parabola, or that invisible study of the mechanisms that create and destroy empires (exemplified by the ottoman one) – and I consider that I finished my mission… If white holes were to exist, with the same absorption ability, but with a proliferating power instead of a mortifying one, this book is one of those holes, at least for me, because it can give birth to other books, like her “twin” Albanian “Eye/s”, written in 2003, and which also has three editions, this far… [A conversation with Iolanda Malamen, Bucharest 2008]
The Rivers of the Sahara, novel, Tirana 1986 / Bucharest 1994 [Lumenjtë e Saharasë, roman, SQ]
A story about a kind of strange harmony of little things in our existence, about absurd, revolts, humor and delicate freedom of originally people. The protagonist of the four of Kyçyku’s novels, Gined Enkelana, is a Genius without a cause.
Insert: ”I encountered deeply ingrained
issues. I had been talking to myself for who knows how long, and with each
uttered word, I learned new ones. I learned the word ‘birth,’ the word ‘issue,’
the phrase ‘deeply ingrained,’ the word ‘speak,’ the word ‘perhaps,’ the phrase
‘for how long,’ the phrase ‘to oneself,’ the conjunction ‘and,’ the word
‘conjunction,’ the word ‘after,’ the word ‘every,’ the word ‘word,’ the word
‘thus,’ the word ‘learn,’ the word ‘news,’ the word ‘phrase,’ the word
‘enough,’ and many more and many more. ” (...)
“Lyrical and visionary, ironic and violent, Kyçyku’s novel draws us into a whirlwind of voices and apparitions, consuming passions and feverish anticipation, in a process of psychological disintegration marked by flashes of arcane eroticism.” [Zandonai Editore 2011] * Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj
Home, novel [Bucharest, 2005, SQ]
'Home' is the story of an Albanian immigrant who is killed
physically as well as metaphorically. Written in an archetypal Albanian
language (the hero's nickname comes from "Ho, me, Ç'kena", meaning
"What's up, Mate?"), the novel speaks about the deep semiotics and
mystery of the relationships between motherland and diaspora, exile and art,
language and speech, childhood and the empty spaces. * Kult Academy Prize ”The best Book / The best Author”,
Tirana 2015
Incógnito [Fragments from the life of guardians and vice versa], novel, Bucharest 2015 [Incógnito, roman, SQ]
In a western barracks that reminds one of exile, during an exile that feels like both death in absence and liberation from any present, a young Albanian, raised with a bunker in the yard (nicknamed Incógnito), is assigned as a guard, or simply lives what seems like an ordinary life. For years, while hoping to return to his early love, he guards weapons and ammunition depots, libraries, himself, his memory, and some unknowns, surrounded by superiors and contemporaries who sometimes seem to embody fate itself, in a space and time where a person no longer costs more than a bullet. Incógnito refuses to be alienated, as he knows almost exactly how long the body’s life is – and he feels with precision how long the soul’s life could last. He does not step out of “the shadow,” deciding that it is better to remain “a chosen nobody, than a somebody with only one life.” * Shortlisted National Prize for Novel, Tirana 2016
The Prompter’s Exodus – streodrama, Bucharest 2022 [Exodul sufleurilor – sterodramă, RO]
A former watchmaker nicknamed Cucu Corect (The Correct
Cookoo), currently a prompter in capital city theatre, remains isolated in
the costume room and is unable to step out because of the pandemic. But instead
of the virus, a revelation strikes him and makes him duplicate his identity in
a unique or insufficiently known way.
You and other stories, Prose (1997-2020)
Selected stories translated from Romanian and Albanian
languages: The Uneaten Pages, Chess, The
Elegant Manners of the Unseen, Dictionary, Triumphalus or The Sunset of the
Stallions, The Fishhook, You, Like under the sky. * Some of this stories are translated in French, German,
Serbian, Greek, Turkish.
Eye/s / Ojo, novel, ES – Bucharest 2003 [Sy,
roman, SQ]
A deep and complex novel about Eastern European life in the past 60 years. A work that sees the Balkan history and not only through the eyes of the soul, and not the contemporary man’s soul through the eyes of history. Including a time frame since the 1940s of the past century and until beyond nowadays, „Eye/s” combines a powerful realism with the grotesque and with a surprising humour, adding and reducing eyes in the heartsick consciousness of the contemporary reader. "One of the goals was this book to ask as many questions as the man’s gaze does. I found essential the balance between the number of questions and the mysteries of life" Kyçyku says. „This mystery was the Eye’s pupil, around which many important matters move, such as: the underground and sometimes bloody competition between races, languages and religions, the force of the genetic maps towards the geopolitical and cultural ones, the material circulation (finances), people being in power and people owned by power, the prosecution of poverty, the living as if only for paying taxes and duties, the mass-media madness and the continuous stay in the grey area, where only the humour and the acceptance of productive absurd stop the soul from getting completely frozen”. It has been rightfully stated that the novel ”Eye/s” is a work that must be read because it can truly not be related. * Translated from Albanian by Petrit Mavrovi
Father / El padre, ES
– Bucharest 2003 [Ati, roman, SQ]
A novel about the fatality of vengeance and the
inglorious humanism of anonyms.
‘The father was so pure, that you sometimes felt like killing him’ – this is one of the key phrases of this novel written in the Albanian language, in Bucharest (2003). A sexagenarian father, his wife and their only son withstand a history where the dictatorship of an ideology has become a dictatorship against destiny, the dictatorship of destiny against the individual and (secretly) the dictatorship of each man against all. ‘When the ideologies only lead to utopias – often being transformed into multiple massacres – in such a way that man is satisfied with little and pleased with nothing, The Father has helped me see well-known things, but never written, and written things, but unknown on a profound level. For often, where life seems unbearable, the intensity of feelings, of questions lacking an answer, is a kind of miracle’ the author said. “The Father”* introduces a new vision of the ancient phenomenon of vengeance (blood-taking / gjakmarrja – SQ.). Any relation between generations contains at least one (sometimes instinctive) tendency to revenge. Each generation feels justified to take revenge on the previous generation, supposedly in the name of the following generation, and in this manner three generations are hurt. In this context, “The Father” is also a hymn to parents’ silent sacrifices and generally to ancestors who were ideologically and not spiritually judged. * Kult Academy Prize ”The best Book / The best Author”, Tirana 2018 * Translated from Albanian by Petrit Mavrovi
The year in which the swan was invented, novel, Bucharest 1996 [Anul în care s-a inventat lebăda, RO]
After an unforgettable night spent with his girlfriend, a schoolboy is arrested in the waters of Lake Ohrida and risks the maximum punishment for "high treason of the homeland and attempt to escape". One night before, three young people crossed the border into Yugoslavia and the communist Albanian officials, to prove their effectiveness, arrest all those who swim in the lake. The protagonist experiences a lesser known dimension of prison. The suffering of an anonymous turns into superior initiation, giving him a name and an identity he had never dreamed of. He finds answers, but especially he asks essential questions about the existence, the humankind, the freedom, the faith, the fate of a world where any system that breaks the transcendent carries within itself its own destruction. The specialized criticism states that, through this novel written directly in Romanian, Kyçyku launches "the project of a new Balkan mythology", completed with "The secret sweetness of madness" (33 prose) and "A glorious and dying tribe – the epos of an oblivion". Regarded as a lucid and impartial witness to the sufferings, conflicts and revelations of Eastern life, as well as to the complex East-West relations, considered "a Balkan Marquez", "Kafka in the Balkans" , through "The year in which the swan was invented", Kyçyku opens a new look at human existence in a global context.
* Translated in Hungarian (Szonda Szabolcs) and in Italian (Giuseppe Stabile).
Ex – novel with love & conspiracy, novel, Bucharest 2008 [Ex – roman de dragoste & conspiraţie, RO]
The astonishing story of a Balkan gravedigger, a man who experiences a miracle rarely captured in literature or the media. His life changes after an ordinary dream, a skull, and a friendship offered by two young people, each struggling in their own way with the unpredictability of existence. Unconventional not only in language and humor, but also through its gentle perspective on everyday suffering and on that ancient ‘war’ – visible, harsh, or underground – waged between generations and beyond, this novel of love & conspiracy reveals certain realities hidden beneath the strange, tacit agreements made between generations of people who, in terms of mentality and emotion, mutually exclude one another. These kinds of exchanges ultimately conceal a game – or rather, the GAME – that humanity has neglected to the point where it no longer knows how to play (with itself) except with its own fate; and yet, this may be the species’ only chance at survival.
Empatycon or The Book of Premature Life, novel, Bucharest 2007 [Empatycon sau Cartea Vieții Premature, RO]
Subtitled ”Memoirs of a Number”, the novel
follows a Balkan writer's journey through different countries of Europe, as
well as through beings (living and dead), and texts from different Balkan
literary eras. The protagonist lives more in empathy than in immediate reality,
deciphering events and people's characters with the help of timeless parables
and metaphors, some from folklore.
The main themes of the novel would be cultural exile, humor versus paranoia and vice versa, paradoxes produced by the sudden expansion of the Eastern space, glimpses of the life of dictatorship and dictators (in society and in literature), the discovery of a specific absurdity, capable of giving positive energies to life in the so-called "gray" spaces; the relationship of the Balkan people with fatality, failure, happiness. The series of parables reveals to one of the characters that "This life is strikingly like a bomb, exploded who knows when and why, and nothing can restore this bomb to what it was before it was a bomb". The characters benefit from, but also face, a triple (or three-dimensional) time in which the time of exile, the present suspended between the land of birth and the promised land, and the time of individual hymeras are interwoven.
Ardian Kyçyku – Pen names: Ardian-Christian Kyçyku / Kuciuk, writer of Albanian and Romanian born on the 23rd of August 1969, Pogradec, Albania, author of many original books (novels, short prose, plays, scenarios, scientific studies, essays, anthologies, translations) and short films (called 'semiotic' by the author). Doctor in Comparative and Universal Literature. University Professor (Semiotics and Communication / The Research Methodology). Certificate of Qualification (Habil.) in the field of doctoral studies in Theatre and Performing Arts. Between 2008 and 2020 he was dean and rector in Bucharest. Since 1998 he is co-founder and co-director of European Review “Haemus”.
webside: www.ardiankycyku.info
