Themes

Organized around Claire's first-person narration, the framing story in "The Albanian Virgin" is familiar from such earlier books as Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), and Friend of My Youth (1990), in which female protagonists set out, with varying degrees of success, to make "a desperate change in [their] life." After arriving on the west coast, Claire opens a bookstore, hoping to gain some semblance of financial independence and to establish "connections" with the inhabitants and spirit of her new home. Although burdened by an initial sense of isolation and her guilt over past decisions, she is never totally despondent. Rather she is ambivalent, at times feeling like a woman who has "finally come out into the world in a new, true skin," at other times struggling to establish a new sense of balance and purpose in her life. It is in the bookstore that she meets and begins...