NONFICTION - Jan. 15, 1995

BIOGRAFI: A Traveler’s Tale by Lloyd Jones (Harcourt Brace/Harvest: $10.95 paper; 256 pp.) “Why would anyone visit Albania?” For 40-odd years the scraggly mountain “republic” was sealed off from the rest of the world by Enver Hoxha, the deified dictator whose smile was said to enrich the soil, whose very glance ripened fruit. TV and foreign publications were proscribed. Present and future depended on one’s biographi, a personal dossier often fabricated by the sigouirimi, the secret police whose job was to find enemies of the state; when they couldn’t they invented them. Jones is a fine writer, chatty, even poetic: “small villages stapled to the hillside,” a forbidding door “opens and closes like a bivalve.” He conveys vividly his impressions of post-Hoxha Albania. Still, caveat emptor.