Mud Sweeter than Honey: Voices of Communist Albania

Product Description

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award
Winner of the Kościelski Award
A revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from award-winning Polish journalist Margo Rejmer.
For nearly half a century Albania was held captive by one man. A cruel dictator with a deep paranoid streak, Enver Hoxha sealed the country’s borders, severed alliances, and enacted a totalitarian regime of gulags and purges. Many thousands suffered and died in silence, a silence that lingers today: thirty years after the end of Hoxha’s regime, its victims are still waiting for justice.
In Mud Sweeter than Honey, Albanians break the silence. Margo Rejmer spent years in Albania gathering interviews that shed light on the four decades of Hoxha’s rule and virtually every walk of life: teachers and children, imprisoned and exiled writers, nuns and factory workers. She arranges the voices of her interlocutors into a chorus that bears witness to how ordinary people lived and died. We are immersed in desperate border crossings, prison revolts, and everyday struggles to make a living. We meet a writer who finds secret freedom in a tiny village library of banned books, overlooked by censors. We meet a man who still only speaks in a whisper, afraid of being overheard.
While Albanians endured surveillance, imprisonment, and torture under Hoxha, they also read books and fell in love, raised families and found ways to survive. In the tradition of Svetlana Alexievich, Mud Sweeter than Honey is our most vivid, intimate portrait available in English of this little-understood corner of Europe.

Review

“Margo Rejmer [has earned] widespread praise for both her meticulous reportage and her discerningly detailed narratives…. The worlds depicted are all at once worn with secrecy, curious with hope, and bold with the human instinct for survival…. Rejmer overcomes all these obstacles with a refreshing amount of brutal honesty. She lets the lived experience of Albanians speak for themselves, until the whole spectrum comes into view; from victims to survivors, heroes to collaborators, Rejmer puts to the page their pain and doubts, their own attempts at dealing with the different roles reality forced them into, their bitterness at the lack of justice in today’s Albania…. Indeed, the voices, rendered in English by a seamless translation, stay with the reader long after the book’s final pages”
―Filip Noubel, Asymptote

“Mud Sweeter than Honey is a remarkable story about a country that emerges from the darkness after suffering the impact of communist totalitarianism…. [Margo Rejmer is] one of the greatest Polish journalists and writers of her generation.”
―Małgorzata Nocuń, New Eastern Europe

“Like Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose oral histories have documented political oppression, Rejmer allows the voices of everyday Albanians―writers and artists, teachers and farm workers, educated or barely schooled―to reveal the privations and fear under which they lived…. A gripping book of starkly revealing testimony.”
―Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“The book is written like a fairy tale. Its introduction sets up the testimonials, which reveal a repressive society based on contradictions bordering on the absurd…. From survivors of the regime, Mud Sweeter than Honey collects important testimonies about life in communist Albania.”
―Erika Harlitz Kern, Foreword Reviews

Review

“Polish journalist Margo Rejmer has pulled the veil back on history in this insightful narrative filled with interviews and observations about the people and their country. Albania has been called Europe’s North Korea. After reading this book, I can understand why. But that’s not the whole story…. This is also the story of a people who found a way to survive…. You’ll get so much out of reading Mud Sweeter than Honey that I can’t wait