A story about two shores, both known and unknown to each other, for different people, but basically similar. This is how we can describe in one sentence the book by the Albanian-Italian author Elvis Malaj. "From your veranda my house looks" (Dal tuo terrazzo si vede casa mia) is the first volume of Malaj's stories, where in 12 stories two worlds face each other through language, worldview, emotions, tradition and innovation, the familiar and the unknown.
Malaj narrates without gloves and without clichés the real life of Albanian youth in Italy and Albania; tells of bullying, sex, family, stereotypes, joys, pains, ordinary life, the inadequacy and turmoil of the immigrant, but with a new and fresh perspective.
"In Malaj's stories - because it's about stories and this seems to me another reason for interest - the whole distance between dream and reality is measured, and it is demonstrated what 'foreign' means either in Italy or in Albania," he says. Luca Formenton, academic, president of the publishing house "Il Saggiatore".
"The distance that pervades the lives of Malaj's characters is internal and manifests itself through cynicism that, in fact, hides something opposite, that is, its melancholy loneliness, designed in search of the place that belongs to it in this world," writes Il. Manifesto.
Elvis Malaj was born in Malësia e Madhe in 1990, but at the age of 1 he left for Italy. There are traces of Albanian identity in his stories, but they do not become predominant.
Translated by Beti Njuma, "My house is visible from your veranda" comes in Albanian from the publishing house "Pegi".
