Centre for Romanian Studies

The Albanian Leviathan is a sardine. The sitting rooms where men gather are tins of sardines. Truth, in order to find space there, has to be folded in two and then folded again.
In a country as small as this, so small that you could easily draw it on a one-to-one scale on this packet of cigarettes, you don’t know where and how to sit or support yourself: on the throat of your neighbour, or on the buttocks of the other fellow’s wife.
Seated, huddled around the coffee table, how can you greet anyone without jabbing someone else with your elbow? How can you pay a compliment without deafening someone?
We can see one another in our spoons, and we are warped.

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