I believe in the magic of words, the impact they have on hearts and minds!
Titles
Sandro Contenta
Serbeze Haxhiaj
Website
Summary
Balkan Insight
Mawenzi
Serbian and Albanian Media
Toronto Star
The 1998-99 conflict between Serbia, a largely Orthodox Christian state, and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian Muslims is the backdrop to Kapllani’s latest work.
It’s based on a true story about a 10-year-old boy in Kosovo, the sole survivor of a massacre by Serb forces in April 1999. The boy watched as 20 ethnic Albanian women and children were shot to death in a house, including his mother and three sisters.
The boy was wounded, but survived by playing dead. He eventually came to Canada with his father as a refugee.
His horrific story is well documented — he testified years later at a United Nations tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. But Kapllani asked that the survivor’s name not be published because his novel fictionalizes his experiences.
The profile by Balkan Insight details how Perparim Kapllani based his novel, The Thin Line, on a real-world tragedy he covered as a young journalist in Tirana in 1999. During the Kosovo War, he interviewed a ten-year-old boy who miraculously survived a horrific massacre in Gjakova by pretending to be dead while lying hidden beneath the bodies of his murdered mother and three sisters.
The book fictionalizes this account, following a young boy named Ermal who survives the attack. The narrative skips forward several years to find Ermal living with his father as an immigrant in Mississauga, Ontario, where he remains profoundly haunted by severe psychological trauma, wartime nightmares, and a consuming desire for revenge. https://balkaninsight.com/2019/05/10/albanian-novelist-explores-a-kosovo-boys-nightmares-of-war/bi/
Perparim Kapllani was born in Elbasan, Albania. He joined military school before going on to study literature at the University of Tirana. In Albania he wrote drama and worked as a journalist, before coming to Canada in 2000 and began to put to paper his many untold stories. He lives in Toronto, where he operates a pizza parlour and writes.
"We do not deny that the Serbian defense forces also committed crimes in suppressing the rebellion of Albanian terrorist groups, as the American state declared them at the beginning of this civil war, and then helped them until today to occupy and seize 17% of Serbia's spiritually and materially fundamental land and expel the Serbs from it."
FlasShqip — intervistë e mëvonshme: The Thin Line si një rishkrim i romanit The Wild Boars, duke theksuar kontributin editorial të M.G. Vassanji, Cheryl Xavier, Nina Munteanu dhe Brandon Pitts.
Rrënjët — nëntor 2020: revista botoi intervistën “Historia jonë – Minierë thesaresh të pazbuluar”, ku flitet posaçërisht për The Thin Line. Në intervistë përmendet edhe jehona e romanit në Kanada, artikulli i Toronto Star, reagimet e komunitetit serb dhe interesimi i lexuesve.
Albanian TV of America — 2021: artikulli “Historia shqiptare, minierë thesaresh të pazbuluar”
