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.