Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is a writer of Albanian descent, who settled in Romania in 1991. He wrote 20 novels in Albanian, and, during the last 10 years, he published a few novels and stories in a perfectly assimilated Romanian language. In Albania, he is vaguely known; here, in Romania, not even that. But his books are a revelation. I will mention here his recently published novel A glorious and dying Tribe (1998). In culturally normal conditions, Kyçyku would be seen as an Eastern-European Marquez. But he is just considered an "artistic brain," transferred from Albania to Romania. And he has the weird status "between a professional cultural renegade and an old cosmopolitan," as he defines himself. I consider him a Romanian writer, in a space that used to be called Thracia a long time ago, from the Carpathians to his Illyria. Kyçyku is the wonder child of a Romania remembering she was once Thracia… and who is today stressed out because she cannot find any collapsing or perhaps redemption allies. (1999) // And a case from the present. The monumental novel A glorious dying tribe by Ardian-Christian Kyçyku. I am very realistic when I say that this author, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku, is in Nobel's attention. (2016). Plural Magazine, Romania's Thracian Memory / Observator Cultural, Bucharest, Vasile Andru
33 episodes from a saga that is foretokening a new Balkan mythology, a violent and sensual structure which perverts the logos by its hyperbole and oxymoron in the guise of imperceptible lows; 33 steps towards the age of salvation and of the redemption of the sins on the cross that is adulated with a fervor which does not excludes the polemic; 33 punching pieces which transforms the history into a poem and the poem into the life of a poet maddened with the world’s madness. What could be sweeter than this mystery which seems that it is writing by itself? Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is one of the great revelations of the contemporary prose. art Panorama, Bucharest, Dan-Silviu Boerescu
This suave rowdy intellectual is doomed to remain the same lucid ultra-sensitive person, a modern aéd of the incessantly shaken times from this accursed part of the world. The young prose writer, as some people called him, is actually old and haunted like the Balkans. But he is a peaceful haunted man, who is moving among the Sweet secrets of the birth and of the death, of the Beginning and the End, scornfully as if he were an undying man or as if he were a rational being that has come from another world. Romanian Reality, Bucharest, Corneliu Vlad
Kyçyku's narrative is indeed a generous invitation to the sublime beauty, it is the amusement of an equilibrist of Albanian, Romanian, all languages of the world. Kyçyku would be able to write a beautiful novel even in a language from which he did not hear a single sound. This is the kind of narrator that he is. The bard par excellence. Elvira Dones, preface to The Rivers of the Sahara in Italian, 2011
Ardian-Christian Kyçyku: there must not lose sight of the event character of his presence now and here, in the Romanian literature, generally speaking. He is not an Albanian who writes in Romanian (…) but an Albanian writer on the all strength of the world, who decided to write into Romanian repeating, in a way, the experience of Panait Istrati. Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is a Panait Istrati of the Albanian literature who has chosen the Romanian instead of the French language. The Day, Bucharest, Mircea Martin
(…) He has been lying in wait for a few years, in the Bucharest town of Romania, and almost each year, he brings out a novel from his literary “factory”. We are speaking about novels of an extraordinary and incontestable value, such as Eyes, Superfluous Angels, Home and actually, all the books this inspired man of the Albanian letters has written (…). Let the jury from Stockholm and the wide public opinion find out that the young Albanian writer, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku, is going to be one day the “rapper”, even younger than Orhan Pamuk maybe, of that high distinction in literature, of that sometimes “rebellious” reward, called Nobel. The Voice, Prishtina; TemA, Tirana, Bajram Sefaj
This is what A.-Ch. Kyçyku does: he feeds us with stories of a kind of enchantment very closed to that one belonging to “One Thousand and One Nights”. It is not only the enchantment the fact that brings them together, but also the tension experienced by the narrator, a tension induced by the realization of the failure which can be fatal (both to the narrator and to the listener). We have to reckon with a writer who forces his limits without any mercy, who does not feel the need to spare anybody and so much the less to spare himself. […] 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 distopia comes into being in an “environment” so much placed in the normality. Sunday’s Newspaper, Bucharest, Bogdan Alexandru Stănescu
‘You can take the man out of exile, but you can’t take the exile out of the man’… Ardian Kyçyku highlights the eternal interior battle of man against what he searches for and what he’s left behind. It is an intermediate space, a space of the endless world of stepping towards life on a foreign land, with traps and question marks, dominating the one who travels to another world and another language. It is a monologue-world, where we often don’t know whether we talk to others or to ourselves. It is a world where we no longer know the arrangement of memories. (…) Everything is approached through a trenchant self-irony. Kyçyku aims to compose more questions than answers, describing the entire world that separates and unites the parallel walking between man and another man, describing the things he wishes and the spaces with which he doesn’t believe he could ever be in dialogue with. Traveling with Yourself and Destiny, MAPO Magazine, Tirana, Agim Baçi
Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has even now arrived faraway, and very upwards with his literary work. There, to the faraway and to the very upwards not those with powerful legs for walking and those who know to cut figures can arrive, but those that the destiny has chosen them. And fortunately, the destiny rarely and faultlessly chooses. Athena’s Newspaper, Athens; TemA, Tirana, Hiqmet Meçaj
Beyond the “magic realism” that seems to characterize the epic substance (and the ontological vision) of his prose works (an unusual mixture between a realism, sometimes a violent one, lacking illusions, of a Cioranian kind, and a “fabulous” imagination, a folklore, mythical and raving one, from a “suspended time” which makes an outsized reality and which intensified it in the same way as it happens in the Eliade’s literary world) it surprises also the unprecedented expressivity of the Romanian language used by Ardian-Christian Kyçyku in his writings, as though he tacitly transgressed the entire occult sigh of the Albanian language into the adopted language. Romanian Messenger, Bucharest, Ştefan Ioanid
Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has two literary home countries, glorified by him in everything he writes. For Albany he feels the responsibility one has in front of his birth and first words place. Romania is a spiritual option that he could never change with anything else. As a writer who has come from a realm mirrored into the mythical Ohrid, and from a maiming, wild ideological repression, his prose’s history is actually the triumph of a huge talent. The Day, Bucharest, Iolanda Malamen
The writer seems to strengthen the fact that small countries and their languages of a limited circulation can offer important authors and extraordinary books as a unique chance for entering into the European circulation of values, for compelling recognition to the European consciousness (…). The Glorious and Dying Tribe is a fundamental book of Albania, written in the Romanian language as though Romanian became suddenly one of the official languages of UNO. The author’s option is a bet made with Romanian language and finally won. In this way the interested Romanian speakers have the possibility to know everything about Albania and especially about the Albanian soul through its mythical-poetic avatars. They have no more to do but to read The Glorious and Dying Tribe. There are fierce and pagan scenes with a great plasticity that alternate with scenarios of a kind of fabulous which is contiguous to transcendentalism, to hyper sense of perception or to bibloskagathia. Romanian Life, Bucharest, Geo Vasile
Being of only 35 years old and owning a vital, rarely met disquietude, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has left 21 volumes for the cultures of the two countries:12 in the Albanian language and 9 in Romanian (these last ones were written in only eight years). In spite of a “diplomatic” and hesitating silence of the autochthonous specialized criticism, both facts, of being considered and suited on the same level with a talented writer such as Ismail Kadare, in his origin country, and also of being assimilated with a kind of writer such as Márquez (and thus being called “Márquez of the Balkans”), in Romania, could say a lot and it even does this. After all, we have to reckon with a great prose writer of whom we should be proud he is breathing around. I assert this with all the honesty I am capable of after I have read greedily four volumes (appeared in the Romanian language, of course), each time mumbling the bitter taste of a reading that seems too quickly ended one. 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
Arriving at the Dantesque half of his life, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has such a bibliography that the Romanian writing seniors would envy him. The literary Tirana, fettered by a schizophrenically dictatorship of the highest level, was giving the national award to Kyçyku as far back as 1988, for the novel The Triumph of Proteus. A symbolic title! This because Proteus is the author himself, with his vacillation between short story and novel, between literature and painting, philology and theology, poetry and journalism. This row of the doublets could continue. It has been said, using a fortunate formula, that this Albanian settled down in Romania, might be called “Márquez of the Balkans”. It is true, but his prose which is sometimes laconic, sometimes voluminous, clear up not only the narrow geography of an accursed space, but also the authentic human-being condition. Kyçyku is a philosopher deep inside his soul. He is a philosopher for whom the world has no longer had secrets, even if it is hiding into the darkness for the time being. Adam Publishing House, Bucharest, Ioan Adam
Therefore, you esteem reader are in front of an exceptional writing. It is a writing of a man descended from the aerie of the eagles. It is a writing which belongs to a man willing to impart us the secrets of gods.Siege, first edition, Bucharest, Val Popa
I had read earlier the novel Eyes, and I have also read the novel Home – a painful travel of the dust that is procreating itself for becoming again a man, a house, a family, a nation. It is a powerful text which wants two pairs of teeth for being thinly ground inside the soul and inside the mind. Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has persuaded us by his extensive creation that he is a centre of gravity situated far away but not outside our literature. Ideart Publishing House, Tirana, Arian Leka
All these
questions are stirred up thanks to the mentioned novel (Home, o.n.) and
they transform him into a writer unique of his kind, a little mare different
than the ancient Greeks, a little more different than Tony Morrison, a little
more different than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is completely the wonderful art
of Ardian-Christian Kyçyku. TemA, Tirana, Riat Ajazaj