The Country Where No One Ever Dies by Ornela Vorpsi, Robert Elsie, Janice Mathie-Heck

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^ l I oddly vibrant Toronto with distinct ly noir elements. Justin, the central consciousness and semi-anti-hero, might be Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim Dixon reincarnated in an even worse job as an adjunct teaching business writing at a community college, living in a shoddy apart ment, chronically short of money, with a moderate but persistent lin gerie fetish. He has become increas ingly detached from his university friends, all more affluent than he, and is newly more or less detached from his rather boring and politi cally correct girlfriend. Like Dixon, and perhaps even more like the Jeff Daniels character in the 1986 film Something Wild, Justin has a rebellious streak that emerges only after he meets Jenna, younger and involved in ways that Justin cannot quite fathom with drug dealers, strippers, and mis cellaneous toughs. She is sexually adventurous, rolls fantastically pre cise joints, and introduces him to a world he had never imagined. Unlike his ex, she is fun, though to anyone not obsessed with her she is almost as big a train wreck as Catherine in Jules and Jim. But walking with her, sometimes with a borrowed pit bull, he sees new respect in the eyes of streetwise men who ordinarily would scorn or ignore him. Justin is devastated when Jenna ends the relationship, but he has learned first that he wants to escape his current life and then that there are ways to do so in ways that make Amis's novel seem prim and old fashioned. He smokes dope, gets pills shipped from India, does a little coke, joins a poker game and wins enough money to make him feel triumphant, gets beaten up by two different thugs, and buys a gun. Having seen the underside of life and realized that "his habi tat was concrete" rather than the "flowery city" his education had promised, he applies his experience to rid himself of a threatening drug dealer, attract two very different women, and blackmail and assault his department chair to get better courses, a full-time position, and a year's severance pay that will allow him to find a new but ill-defined way of living. It is not clear that, morally speaking, he is better off, and the reader can only speculate what will happen if he confronts some seri ous wiseguys, but he seems content with his new persona as he moves "out to the air, to the world out there. He had a loaded gun in his bag. His whole body felt hard." Does Smith, who also writes advice on fashion, style, and language for the Globe & Mail, endorse this view? Or is he, in early middle age, extending his range of subject and theme to more problematic areas? Whatever the case, Girl Crazy moves quickly and compellingly as a story and, though less con sciously literate than Smith's ear lier books, is as clean and direct as ever in style. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Ornela Vorpsi.The Country Where No One Ever Dies. Robert Elsie & Jan ice Mathie-Heck, tr. Champaign, Illi nois. Dalkey Archive. 2009.109 pages. $12.95. ISBN 978-1-56478-568-8 What do you think was ubiquitous and inevitable in Communist Alba nia? What basic fact or factor domi nated life there? Isolation? Poverty or consumer scarcity? The heavy hand of the police, the party, or the propagandists? Most of us are used to thinking of pre-1992 Albania in these terms. But?although these appear in Ornela Vorpsi's narra tive?readers are in for a jolt when they realize that this fine, short first novel is built on sex; that is to say, Vorpsi deftly shows us Albania as a society that is built on a set of prickly and crudely patriarchal approaches to sexuality and gender. The novel is efficiently and, despite the some times painful content, beautifully written. It is also the first novel by an Albanian woman ever to be trans lated into English. This particular title should, and will, spur thought. Does Vorpsi mean that Albania is a land where nothing changes, or where nothing bad actually ever happens? Or are men

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