The three lives of Mr. P.

Published by Dituria, Tirana 2024, pp. 272 The Three Lives of Mr. P. is a bold, genre-bending novel that moves between political satire, mythological reinvention, and speculative fiction. With sharp wit and a dazzling narrative structure, it follows the extraordinary – and often absurd – journey of Mr. P., a powerful political figure who unexpectedly becomes entangled with forces far beyond the earthly realm. At the height of his political career, Mr. P., the president of a small democratic nation, begins to experience strange disturbances in his meticulously ordered life. A missing slipper, an inexplicable sense of dislocation, and a mysterious Voice that calls to him mark the beginning of his unraveling. As he retreats into his office and cuts himself off from the outside world, he is torn between paranoia, destiny, and the seduction of absolute power. In a parallel narrative, a nameless narrator – serving as a modern Virgil – finds himself aboard a lavish yet unsettling ship populated by mythological figures who have been reimagined in contemporary form: Charon, Persephone, Pluto, and others, each entangled in bureaucracy, corruption, and existential ennui. The narrator is guided through their world by Ram Lau, a cunning trickster who seems to know more than he admits. The ship becomes a vessel between worlds, where the living, the dead, and the powerful converge, mirroring the moral decay and absurdities of earthly politics. A third storyline shifts into a futuristic clinic, The Frontiers of Neuroscience of Homo Planetarium, where an AI-assisted medical team erases traumatic earthly memories from interplanetary refugees. Here, a bewildered patient known as AL-001 is treated after an intergalactic journey gone wrong—one that traces back to Mr. P.’s fateful encounter with the cosmic Voice. As his memories are stripped away, fragments of Mr. P.’s past political ambitions and metaphysical delusions resurface, revealing a surprising link between the three narrative planes. Across these intertwined “lives”, the novel gradually exposes a single central truth: Mr. P., the narrator, and the space-bound patient are connected in an existential loop where power, identity, and memory collapse into one another. Through shifting perspectives and playful metafiction, the book crafts a profound meditation on the human hunger for significance, the seductions of authority, and the tragicomic ways individuals become trapped in their own myths. Stylistically rich and philosophically charged, The Three Lives of Mr. P. offers a unique blend of political allegory, literary fantasy, and speculative satire. It appeals to readers of José Saramago, Italo Calvino, Mikhail Bulgakov, and George Saunders, while remaining unmistakably original in voice and vision.