'uqāb: Persian 1401

A banal night, a deserted street, a young man, Maks, who leaves the house to buy a pack of cigarettes: but then he stumbles. And his nightmare begins. Because a simple tumble turns into an endless fall, an abyss in which Maks loses and regains consciousness in alternating phases, slipping into the void until he finds himself in another place together with other "decayed" people like him: a sort of ghost town in which silence and reticence seem like laws never to be broken. A place of exile, perhaps political, a kind of open-air prison from which only one knows that it will be impossible to escape or escape. Obsessed by the memory of his girlfriend Anna, Maks searches for meaning in the new reality: he is helped by the speeches of a bartender, the meeting with the engineer Dede Halo, and above all the love of another Anna, who perhaps could assist him in finding a way out. And then there is the mysterious zoo of the town: with the wolf, the bears, the memory of the dead crocodile, and especially the eagle, the bird that increasingly occupies the protagonist's morbid and delirious fantasies. Kadaré's novel tells a distressing and dreamlike story with lightning-fast writing, to the point of making the young Maks almost the symbol of something much bigger than himself, the emblem of a condition of metaphysical and existential imprisonment; while his nightmare takes on the increasingly clear contours of a known place, not unlike an exile, or a prison, into which we could all fall.