Elvira Dones

Sworn Virgin

«A woman is touching up her lipstick, her husband watching with slight disgust, tapping his fingers on his passport. Hana files the scene under ‹Man ot of love, woman still hoping, marriage ceasefire about to expire›.»

Tirana-born Elvira Dones has been cutting across cultures and languages for a long time. Today she is oscillating between the Italian part of Switzerland and the United States, alternating her writing between Italian and Albanian, translating herself. She introduces personas with unstable identities who are either just passing through or banned. Hana Doda has crossed the crumbling border between the sexes: Confronted with her beloved uncle Gjergj’s illness and the danger of a forced marriage in the «damned» mountains of Albania, she resorts to an old custom, changes into a man and becomes a «Vergine giurata», a sworn virgin. In order to escape her new body and the weight of tradition she emigrates to the United States fifteen years later where certain relatives are waiting for her and she can rediscover her fragile but eager femininity. Although the last part might appear a little too sentimental at times, Elvira Dones constructs her novel, just like her protagonist, on an innovative and wavering language. She counters the inner banishment with an urge for knowledge that is framed in happenings of stirring humanity.

(Pierre Lepori, transl. by Anja Hälg)

And Other Stories, London 2014

ISBN: 9781908276346