Eternal Friendship: An Unlikely Cold War Connection
Excerpt from Anouck Durand: Eternal Friendship (Siglio Press, 2017). All rights reserved.
French artist-writer Anouk Durand’s photo-novel, Eternal Friendship, is collaged from photographic archives, personal letters and propaganda magazines interspersed with text. It tells the true story of a friendship between two photographers forged in the crucible of war. It begins in Albania during World War II, stops in China during the Cold War, and ends in Israel as Communism is crumbling. Below, we have reprinted Eliot Weinberger’s introduction, followed by a short excerpt from the book.
The Albanian language has a tense for surprise. That is, the verb-ending changes if one says “You speak Albanian” or “You speak Albanian!” The physical landscape of the country is punctuated with periods: 200,000 tiny dome-shaped concrete bunkers, scattered everywhere, meant to hold one or two snipers each, and built by Enver
