Remainders of The Day

The literary output of Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, the world’s most avidly Stalinist ruler until his death in 1985, is broad in reach; a set of his collected works sprawls across a good meter of bookshelf. But the public’s appetite never matched the government’s passion for printing the dictator’s often paranoid musings on Albania’s sole true path to proletariat rule and his lonely struggle against nonbelievers. Since the 1991 fall of the communist government, some of Hoxha’s tracts have been recycled as housing insulation, but at least 600 tons of the books are moldering expensively in Albanian warehouses. Last week the government announced a solution: millions of volumes will be reprocessed into cardboard. The dustbin for his history draws closer.