Book 164: Kosovo (English) – My Cat Yugoslavia (Pajtim STATOVCI)

I looked at the village as though I weren’t really there at all, as though everything around me was nothing but a dream, a mirage blown in on the wind. I sighed and breathed in the heavy, dusty air – I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had come here, that I was standing on this sand after all these years, how familiar the sound of the earth was as I placed my foot on ints surface. It was a soft sound, the same sound as waves and leaves caressing the earth. The mind always tends to forget these things, I thought, but he body never forgets.

Bekim is the son of a refugee from Yugoslavia’s 1980s civil war. He grows up in Finland, portrayed as a country uncomfortable with those who are different. As an outsider, ethnically, religiously and sexually, he is lonely and alienated from society, his only friend his (beautifully described) boa constrictor. Then things get slightly weird and science fictional when in a gay bar he meets – a (very cool but annoying) talking cat.

The second (maybe that should be first) story is that of his mother, living in Kosovo, in an arranged marriage with an irascible man. (The cat doesn’t treat Bekim much better).

There is a second, more conventional cat, a stray that he rescues in Prishtinë on a visit. It wasn’t quite clear to me which cat was referred to by the title.

Most of the Albanian words (the chief language of Kosovo) that occur are unfortunately not translated.

Much of the writing is very good, especially his animal descriptions. Statovci is obviously a brilliant young writer, though some facets of his first novel felt unresolved or unclear to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if his second isn’t amazing.

Statovci, Pajtim (1990 – ), My Cat Yugoslavia, translated from Finnish by David Hackston, London, Pushkin Press, 2017, 2018, ISBN 978-1-78227-360-8

Originally published in Finland as Kissani Jugoslavia, 2014