The Unreliable Narrator: Reading Aunt Behije Against Herself

The story begins before its narrator has composed herself. Aunt Behije’s mind is fixed on one thing: the boy she had chosen for her daughter has married someone else. Sleep has left her. Her eyes have sunk into her face. Her scheming has come to nothing. And the woman who got him — that is what nearly makes her burst.

AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION

Albanika Press

6/25/20264 min read

What follows is one of the most sustained and inventive performances in Old Neno’s Stories: a monologue so thick with jealousy, exaggeration, and wounded pride that it quietly dismantles itself at every turn. Musine Kokalari gives Aunt Behije no external check, no correcting voice, no narrator stepping in to steady the account. Everything the reader knows comes through her. And everything she tells us is colored, to the point of distortion, by what she wanted and did not get.

A Portrait That Undermines Itself

The girl Aunt Behije describes is, by her account, a disaster: stunted, skeletal, a walking corpse who looks as though she might snap in the middle. Eyes bulging. Nose like a spike. Teeth like a bull’s. Dark as an Arab, Behije says, like none you have seen. She would not take this girl even as a servant in her house.

And yet this girl — this walking corpse — secured the most eligible young man in the neighborhood. An only son. A great merchant’s heir. A household stocked with carpets from Misir, Anatolia, and Istanbul; taffetas from Shan and Baghdad; silks from Arabistan. Behije has seen the goods with her own eyes.

The gap between the portrait and the outcome is where Kokalari’s technique operates. A narrator reliable enough to be trusted would not describe a successful rival in these terms. The extravagance of the insults — their escalating, almost comic specificity — signals that we are inside a consciousness shaped more by need than by observation. Behije is not lying, exactly. She is telling the truth as fury has refracted it.

The Spell Story

Midway through the monologue, Behije pivots to support her case against the bride’s family with a story about the girl’s aunt — a woman who, she claims, cast a spell fixed to a doorframe to prevent her pregnant sister-in-law from giving birth. Ten months passed. The sister-in-law wasted away. Then the doorstone was lifted, the spell undone, and at that same moment the aunt fell dead and the sister-in-law went into labor.

Behije delivers this as settled fact, without hesitation or qualification. She adds, almost as an aside, that she was glad when the aunt died — because the aunt had spoken ill of her years before, when she sent Hasan’s bride away.

The aside is telling. Behije’s account of the spell is not offered simply as evidence of the family’s wickedness; it is woven through with her own grudges, her own history of social combat. The story she tells about others is inseparable from the story she is telling about herself. And readers who have been paying attention will notice: this is a woman who, by her own admission, once sent away a bride — the kind of act she is now condemning in others.

What the Monologue Cannot See

The closing line of the story is its most compressed and most revealing moment. Having exhausted her curses — may those who spoiled her plans never see a happy day, may their lips split and bleed, may disaster rise against them from where they least expect it — Behije arrives at something her dead mother used to say:

“Oh, my dear child — what can I say? They are not good… but everyone has their own luck. As my mother, God have mercy on her soul, used to say: may you have the luck of bad women.”

The proverb is ostensibly directed at the women she despises. But it arrives after the fury has run its course, and it lands differently than it was aimed. Behije has planned, schemed, lost sleep, and assessed a family’s wealth down to the provenance of their carpets. She has done everything a woman in her position could do. And the “bad women” — shameless, rude, half-mad by her account — got the prize.

The proverb is meant as a curse on them. It reads also as a confession: that the moral logic Behije has lived by — virtue rewarded, propriety recognized, careful planning bearing fruit — has simply failed her. She cannot explain this failure from within that logic. All she can do is name its injustice in the words her mother gave her, and hope they land somewhere.

Why the Unreliability Is the Point

Kokalari gives Aunt Behije no interlocutor who pushes back, no narrator who corrects the record, no scene in which the bride appears to offer a different impression. The monologue is the story. What the reader receives is a voice performing itself — and in that performance, revealing far more than it intends.

This is a demanding technique. It asks readers to hold two registers at once: to follow Behije’s account on its own terms, feeling the genuine sting of her disappointment, while also reading the gaps, the contradictions, and the moments where the fury tips over into something closer to self-exposure. The comedy and the pathos are not separate. They occupy the same sentences.

What makes May You Have the Luck of Bad Women linger is precisely this double quality. Behije is not a villain, not a fool, not simply a figure of satirical ridicule. She is a woman who has played by rules that did not pay off, speaking in the only language available to her — and the story she tells, unreliable as it is, remains a portrait of something real.

Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:

📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284

📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G

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