The Deathers, novel, Pogradec 1988 / Bucharest 2020 [Mortët, roman, SQ]
A Glorious and Dying Tribe – The Saga of an Oblivion, Bucharest 1998 / 2024 [Un trib glorios și muribund – eposul unei uitări, RO]
The Rivers of the Sahara, novel, Tirana 1986 / Bucharest 1994 [Lumenjtë e Saharasë, roman, SQ]
Home, novel [Bucharest, 2005, SQ]
Incógnito, novel, Bucharest 2015 [Incógnito, roman, SQ]
The Prompter’s Exodus – streodrama, Bucharest 2022 [Exodul sufleurilor – sterodramă, RO]
You and other stories, Prose (1997-2020)
Eye/s / Ojo, novel, ES – Bucharest 2003 [Sy, roman, SQ]
Father / El padre, ES – Bucharest 2003 [Ati, roman, SQ]
The year in which the swan was invented, novel, Bucharest 1996 [Anul în care s-a inventat lebăda, RO]
Ex – novel with love & conspiracy, novel, Bucharest 2008 [Ex – roman de dragoste & conspiraţie, RO]
Empatycon or The Book of Premature Life, novel, Bucharest 2007 [Empatycon sau Cartea Vieții Premature, RO]
Zo-om, prose in Albanian, „Naimi”, Tirana 2023 / „Librarium Haemus”, Bucharest 2024
*
The Deathers, novel, Pogradec 1988 / Bucharest 2020 [Mortët, roman, SQ]
The powerful Morti family suddenly shuts itself off at
home, convincing the city that they have left the country (Albania). The
reasons for their escape are unknown. A strange life passes by, mixing epochs
and beings, between the walls. The novel was written in 1988. The word
"Mort" in Albanian has several meanings: the dead people, the
process of honoring the dead, burial, death.
A Glorious and Dying
Tribe – The Saga of an Oblivion, Bucharest 1998 / 2024 [Un
trib glorios și muribund – eposul unei uitări, RO]
In his new novel, A Glorious and
Dying Tribe (his third book published in Romanian, after The
Year the Swan Was Invented in 1997 and The Sweet Secret of
Madness in 1998), young writer Ardian-Christian Kuciuk continues his
bold project of building a new Balkan mythology. On an Illyrian-Thracian
foundation, he layers themes from Albanian history, along with legends and
echoes of the Ottoman world – richly infused with both authentic and improvised
traditions from the mix of peoples inside Europe’s infamous 'powder
keg.' [Dan-Silviu Boerescu, Chronicle of an Apocryphal History of
the Accursed Balcania Magna, “A Glorious and Dying Tribe” preface to the
first edition, 1998].
I assert this after I have read The Glorious and Dying Tribe (the epopee of an oblivion), an extraordinary book, a real Balkan epopee of a world rate, a book that any literature, no matter how great it is, would be proud with. [Agora On-line, Paul Vinicius]
A visionary fiction writer, of an amazing force, he practices a real maieutic applied to the universal memory and he cannot help drilling into the stone depths of the myth for drawing out the bloody result with his both arms and for throwing it in front of us with a torrent of parables designated to hide rather than to reveal. It always astonishes the natural process (in this case) through which the universal dystopia comes into being in an “environment” so much placed in the normality. [Sunday’s Newspaper, Bucharest, Bogdan Alexandru Stănescu]
It is an honor for our literature that this total novel, with a Marquezian scope, exists in the Romanian language. If in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude the life of a Latin American family over the course of a century is depicted, in the epic being launched today – without being a replica – the life of Balkania over the span of a millennium is portrayed in multiple layers. [Vasile Andru, Bookfest 2005]
Kuciuk already stands out as one of the leading voices in today’s literature – whether Romanian, Albanian, Balkan, or European. His value, in our humble opinion, goes far beyond the borders of any one country or region. He reaches for a powerful, symbolic language that transcends geographical belonging. Ardian-Christian Kuciuk is already a master of imaginative storytelling (to borrow a phrase from Nedelciu). He has the rare ability to create vast, mirror-like worlds..." [Titus Vîjeu, A Balkan Marquez, 2001]
In August 1998, after
reads the first edition of the “Tribe…”, a famous Romanian critic told me that,
due to such a book, the Romanian culture should be firing its canons. The
official ones actually did it, but her canons had silence instead of powder. Of
course, my happiness that I was given to write the “Tribe…” plenary overcomes
any praise, reward or good criticism. It was then that I understood the role of
this strange relation between a certain literary value and the officials. It is
something like: the diamond has been given to me, they insist not to honor me
with a hand of coals. It is better to be alive and considered dead, than vice
versa. From a certain point of this post vitam, the fate of this epopeea has
left me behind or in shadow, but, on the other hand, I didn't want it any other
way. It is enough for the avid reader to follow, in the book, the unpredictable
relation of the Balkan entity with the Oriental or the Occidental, the desert
games as a geographical and metaphorical space, the tools that produce and
distort myths, realities – “live flesh” from which the great literature
incarnates itself; the blind soldiers parabola, or that invisible study of the
mechanisms that create and destroy empires (exemplified by the ottoman one) –
and I consider that I finished my mission… If white holes were to exist, with
the same absorption ability, but with a proliferating power instead of a
mortifying one, this book is one of those holes, at least for me, because it
can give birth to other books, like her “twin” Albanian “Eye/s”, written in 2003, and which also has three
editions, this far… [A conversation with Iolanda Malamen,
Bucharest 2008]
The Rivers of the
Sahara, novel, Tirana 1986
/ Bucharest 1994 [Lumenjtë e Saharasë, roman, SQ]
A story about a kind of strange harmony of little things in our existence, about absurd, revolts, humor and delicate freedom of originally people. The protagonist of the four of Kyçyku’s novels, Gined Enkelana, is a Genius without a cause.
Insert: ”I encountered deeply ingrained issues. I had been talking to myself for who knows how long, and with each uttered word, I learned new ones. I learned the word ‘birth,’ the word ‘issue,’ the phrase ‘deeply ingrained,’ the word ‘speak,’ the word ‘perhaps,’ the phrase ‘for how long,’ the phrase ‘to oneself,’ the conjunction ‘and,’ the word ‘conjunction,’ the word ‘after,’ the word ‘every,’ the word ‘word,’ the word ‘thus,’ the word ‘learn,’ the word ‘news,’ the word ‘phrase,’ the word ‘enough,’ and many more and many more. ” (...)
“Lyrical and
visionary, ironic and violent, Kyçyku’s novel draws us into a whirlwind of
voices and apparitions, consuming passions and feverish anticipation, in a
process of psychological disintegration marked by flashes of arcane eroticism.”
[Zandonai Editore 2011] * Translated from Albanian by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj
Home, novel [Bucharest, 2005, SQ]
'Home' is the story of an Albanian
immigrant who is killed physically as well as metaphorically. Written in an
archetypal Albanian language (the hero's nickname comes from "Ho, me,
Ç'kena", meaning "What's up, Mate?"), the novel speaks about the
deep semiotics and mystery of the relationships between motherland and
diaspora, exile and art, language and speech, childhood and the empty
spaces. * Kult Academy Prize ”The best Book / The best Author”, Tirana
2015
Incógnito [Fragments from the life of guardians and vice versa], novel, Bucharest 2015 [Incógnito, roman, SQ]
In a western barracks that reminds one of
exile, during an exile that feels like both death in absence and liberation
from any present, a young Albanian, raised with a bunker in the yard (nicknamed
Incógnito), is assigned as a guard, or simply lives what seems like an ordinary
life. For years, while hoping to return to his early love, he guards weapons
and ammunition depots, libraries, himself, his memory, and some unknowns,
surrounded by superiors and contemporaries who sometimes seem to embody fate
itself, in a space and time where a person no longer costs more than a bullet.
Incógnito refuses to be alienated, as he knows almost exactly how long the
body’s life is – and he feels with precision how long the soul’s life could
last. He does not step out of “the shadow,” deciding that it is better to
remain “a chosen nobody, than a somebody with only one life.” *
Shortlisted National Prize for Novel, Tirana 2016
The Prompter’s Exodus –
streodrama, Bucharest 2022 [Exodul
sufleurilor – sterodramă, RO]
A former watchmaker nicknamed Cucu Corect (The Correct
Cookoo), currently a prompter in capital city theatre, remains isolated in
the costume room and is unable to step out because of the pandemic. But instead
of the virus, a revelation strikes him and makes him duplicate his identity in
a unique or insufficiently known way.
You and other stories - Prose (1997-2020)
Selected stories translated from Romanian and Albanian
languages: The Uneaten Pages, Chess, The Elegant Manners of the Unseen,
Dictionary, Triumphalus or The Sunset of the Stallions, The Fishhook, You, Like
under the sky. * Some of this stories are translated in French,
German, Serbian, Greek, Turkish.
Eye/s / Ojo - Novel, ES – Bucharest
2003 [Sy, roman, SQ]
A deep and complex novel about Eastern European life
in the past 60 years. A work that sees the Balkan history and not only through
the eyes of the soul, and not the contemporary man’s soul through the eyes of
history. Including a time frame since the 1940s of the past century and until
beyond nowadays, „Eye/s” combines a powerful realism with the grotesque and
with a surprising humour, adding and reducing eyes in the heartsick
consciousness of the contemporary reader. "One of the goals was this book
to ask as many questions as the man’s gaze does. I found essential the balance
between the number of questions and the mysteries of life" Kyçyku says.
„This mystery was the Eye’s pupil, around which many important matters move,
such as: the underground and sometimes bloody competition between races,
languages and religions, the force of the genetic maps towards the geopolitical
and cultural ones, the material circulation (finances), people being in power
and people owned by power, the prosecution of poverty, the living as if only
for paying taxes and duties, the mass-media madness and the continuous stay in
the grey area, where only the humor and the acceptance of productive absurd
stop the soul from getting completely frozen”. It has been rightfully
stated that the novel ”Eye/s” is a work that must be read because it can truly
not be related. * Translated from Albanian by Petrit Mavrovi
Father / El padre, ES – Bucharest
2003 [Ati, roman, SQ]
A novel about the fatality of vengeance and the
inglorious humanism of anonyms.
‘The father was so pure, that you sometimes felt like
killing him’ – this is one of the key phrases of this novel written in the
Albanian language, in Bucharest (2003). A sexagenarian father, his wife and
their only son withstand a history where the dictatorship of an ideology has
become a dictatorship against destiny, the dictatorship of destiny against the
individual and (secretly) the dictatorship of each man against all. ‘When the
ideologies only lead to utopias – often being transformed into multiple
massacres – in such a way that man is satisfied with little and pleased with
nothing, The Father has helped me see well-known things, but never written, and
written things, but unknown on a profound level. For often, where life seems
unbearable, the intensity of feelings, of questions lacking an answer, is a
kind of miracle’ the author said. “The Father”* introduces a new vision of the
ancient phenomenon of vengeance (blood-taking / gjakmarrja – SQ.). Any relation
between generations contains at least one (sometimes instinctive) tendency to
revenge. Each generation feels justified to take revenge on the previous
generation, supposedly in the name of the following generation, and in this
manner three generations are hurt. In this context, “The Father” is also a hymn
to parents’ silent sacrifices and generally to ancestors who were ideologically
and not spiritually judged. * Kult Academy Prize ”The best Book / The best
Author”, Tirana 2018 * Translated from Albanian by Petrit Mavrovi
The year in which the swan was invented, novel, Bucharest 1996 [Anul în care s-a
inventat lebăda, RO]
After an unforgettable night spent with his girlfriend, a schoolboy is
arrested in the waters of Lake Ohrida and risks the maximum punishment for
"high treason of the homeland and attempt to escape". One night
before, three young people crossed the border into Yugoslavia and the communist
Albanian officials, to prove their effectiveness, arrest all those who swim in
the lake. The protagonist experiences a lesser known dimension of prison. The
suffering of an anonymous turns into superior initiation, giving him a name and
an identity he had never dreamed of. He finds answers, but especially he asks
essential questions about the existence, the humankind, the freedom, the faith,
the fate of a world where any system that breaks the transcendent carries
within itself its own destruction. The specialized criticism states that,
through this novel written directly in Romanian, Kyçyku launches "the
project of a new Balkan mythology", completed with "The secret
sweetness of madness" (33 prose) and "A glorious and dying
tribe – the epos of an oblivion". Regarded as a lucid and impartial
witness to the sufferings, conflicts and revelations of Eastern life, as well
as to the complex East-West relations, considered "a Balkan Marquez",
"Kafka in the Balkans" , through "The year in which the swan
was invented", Kyçyku opens a new look at human existence in a global
context.
* Translated in Hungarian (Szonda Szabolcs) and in Italian (Giuseppe
Stabile).
Ex – novel with love
& conspiracy, novel, Bucharest 2008 [Ex – roman de dragoste & conspiraţie, RO]
The astonishing story of a Balkan
gravedigger, a man who experiences a miracle rarely captured in literature or
the media. His life changes after an ordinary dream, a skull, and a friendship
offered by two young people, each struggling in their own way with the
unpredictability of existence. Unconventional not only in language and humor,
but also through its gentle perspective on everyday suffering and on that
ancient ‘war’ – visible, harsh, or underground – waged between generations and
beyond, this novel of love & conspiracy reveals certain realities hidden
beneath the strange, tacit agreements made between generations of people who,
in terms of mentality and emotion, mutually exclude one another. These kinds of
exchanges ultimately conceal a game – or rather, the GAME
– that humanity has neglected to the point where it no longer knows how to play
(with itself) except with its own fate; and yet, this may be the species’ only
chance at survival.
Empatycon or The Book of
Premature Life, novel, Bucharest 2007 [Empatycon sau Cartea Vieții Premature,
RO]
... describes, reveals, and at times unobtrusively deciphers the mysteries of
the life of a Balkan scribe whose textual and existential message compels him
to live more in empathy than in immediate reality.
The protagonist’s life is cyclically pierced by parables and short stories that
constitute self-contained chapters of the novel and which, at times, become his
only oases of normality in a bloody – and ink-stained – struggle not to be laid
waste by chaos.
Cultural exile; the often invisible competition between races and individuals
representing different communities, beyond stereotypes, programmed literature,
and imported psychoses; humour against paranoia, and paranoia against humour;
the paradoxes produced by the sudden expansion of the Eastern European space
after 1990; fragments of the life of dictatorship and dictators (in society and
in literature); journeys not only through time, but also through texts
and beings; the tender evocation of an unprecedented absurdity,
often a source of unsuspected artistic energies; the inevitable reconsideration
of what is inevitable and the assumption of it in the name of great literature
– these are only some of the issues conveyed by the texts from which the book
is composed, or decomposed.
The Scribe’s journey, including its stylistic dimension, unfolds within the
space between two states of being: from that of a “son of his time” to that of
an “orphan of other people’s age.”
A surprising gallery of portraits and unusual destinies emerges, much as in the
everyday life of the Balkans, carrying its mysteries toward their
transformation into memorable characters, while simultaneously turning
characters into living anonymous figures. Their rediscoveries, defeats, or
ascents – including those of the Scribe – remain mysterious and can be
understood more clearly only through empathy, as though they existed behind the
scenes of the things that can be seen, from which we receive merely
signs and suggestions, at times insufficiently connected to one another.
This kind of semiotic flow convinces one of the contemporaries touched by the
text that “This life bears an astonishing resemblance to a bomb, exploded at
an unknown time and for an unknown reason, and nothing can ever restore this
bomb to what it was before it became a bomb.”
In his notes, the author confessed: A book that perhaps needs to be
rewritten cyclically, even if only in thought, sometimes even by the reader(s),
so that the life within it may become mature.
The first version of the novel was written in Bucharest in 2005.
Zo-om, prose in Albanian. „Naimi”, Tirana 2023 / „Librarium Haemus”,
Bucharest 2024
Zo-om is
a literary exploration along a metaphorical, fractured border-line, weaving
together punctuation-like symbols and an anxiety-laden emptiness. It probes the
fluid, silence-charged boundary between animal and human. The human side
crosses this boundary often via deliberate – or sometimes unavoidable –
silence. The animal side communicates through "speech without words".
The narrative unfolds in seven interconnected parts, titled: Short
Eastory (An author-crafted word), Cage, Clean, Borrowed voices, The
heritage, l.o.l., More hidden than Literature. These parts collectively span
not only Albanian, Balkan and European contexts but also broader universal
sensibilities and mentalities. The author constructs the concept of “Zo-om” –
layered term evoking: Zoo(logy), Zo-om* (with ”om” meaning “human” in
Romanian), Zoom (as in “magnification” in English). It's a creative weaving of
linguistic and semiotic meanings, characteristic of Kyçyku’s stylistic
innovation. ”Zo-om” stands out as a philosophical and poetic narrative, rich in
semiotic layers and linguistic play, emblematic of Kyçyku’s broader oeuvre –
marked by cultural reflection, bilingual expression, and experimental
form.
Insert: „Over forty years passed like a whistle, but
one of those whistles from people who no longer have all their teeth. They left
me no change, and so I believe they didn’t even owe me any. But I didn’t let
them off either. Irrefutable evidence were the teeth that had fallen out during
that whistle. In their place, I now bore tightly screwed-in teeth and molars of
questionable composition and origin — likely from the bones of mammals or
reptiles that don’t whistle and, at most, might growl. I hadn’t been able to
whistle for a long time, but that neither kept me young nor stopped aging.
We had stopped – my father and I – in
front of the building where I had been killed.” (…)
This is a captivating book – layered with clues, appearances, signals,
symbols, and symptoms; in short: signs. It is traversed by a finely chiseled
style, enriched with subtle humor woven into the characters’ dialogues – at
times grotesque, at times absurd. With characters ranging from theater actors
to gravediggers, it invites the reader to engage the mind’s zoom lens, to
activate the imagination in order to fully grasp its intricate depths. Kyçyku,
a master craftsman of both the Albanian and Romanian languages (writing with
equal ease in each), expresses free and lucid thought with remarkable
conciseness. His works embody the principle of “few words, many meanings. (…)
He stands as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Albanian and
Romanian literature. [Dr. Viktor Bakillari, Faculty of Foreign Languages,
University of Tirana, published in Jeta e Re, Prishtina 2024]
A short presentation of book in YT by Top Albanian Radio
A short presentation realised by the author
*
Ardian Kyçyku – Pen names: Ardian-Christian Kyçyku / Kuciuk, writer of Albanian and Romanian born on the 23rd of August 1969, Pogradec, Albania, author of many original books (novels, short prose, plays, scenarios, scientific studies, essays, anthologies, translations) and short films (called 'semiotic' by the author). Doctor in Comparative and Universal Literature. University Professor (Semiotics and Communication / The Research Methodology). Certificate of Qualification (Habil.) in the field of doctoral studies in Theatre and Performing Arts. Between 2008 and 2020 he was dean and rector in Bucharest. Since 1998 he is co-founder and co-director of European Review “Haemus”.
webside: https://akycyku.com
