Crossing

April 8, 2019
Two young Albanian men yearn to escape their fractured country in this disorienting but affecting novel from Statovci (My Cat Yugoslavia). Fourteen-year-old Bujar struggles to cope with his father’s death in 1990, just as Albania lurches toward capitalism in the aftermath of communist leader Enver Hoxha’s death. With his mother incapacitated by grief, Bujar and his best friend Agim, who is tentatively exploring his gender identity, decide to earn money any way possible in order to fund their dream of seeking asylum in Western Europe. They sell stolen cigarettes in the capital, Tirana, and then tourist trinkets in the port of Durrës. Their story of escape blends with the Albanian myths Bujar’s father told and appears in between stories about the dizzyingly fabricated identities one of them takes on during a series of moves to Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States. A final move to Finland in 2003 sets the stage for the deep betrayal of a new love interest and the shocking conclusion that explains why the two boys are no longer together. The matter-of-fact depiction of numerous traumas intensifies the impact. Statovci memorably portrays the struggles and dislocations of his complicated characters.

April 1, 2019
The second novel by the author of My Cat Yugoslavia (2017) is a sad and searching tale of a young Albanian whose struggle to understand his sexual orientation and gender identity is interwoven with his struggle to survive in foreign lands. Dazed by the death of his father and disappearance of his sister, Bujar agrees to run away with his best friend, Agim. At first it's great fun?they have money, energy, and a stolen handgun. But the bleak Tirana winter soon catches up with them, and before long Bujar and Agim decide to take their chances in a rowboat on the Adriatic Sea. From there, life gets complicated. Old identities are shed, the teens' relationship grows fragile, trauma is a constant, lying a survival strategy. And though opportunities for love and stability eventually emerge in Germany, Spain, New York, and Finland, Bujar may be too restless or too broken to realize them. Statovci uses no magic-realist elements here, and with its stark language, unanswered questions, and unrelenting heartbreak, this may be the more poignant of his powerful novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2018

Winner of Finland's prestigious Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for Best First Novel and praised here, Statovci's My Cat Yugoslavia featured a gay ethnic Albanian from Kosovo making his way in Finland with the help of a talking cat. No cat now but the same sense of exile and struggle for identity as Bujar flees post-Communist Albania for Italy with his best friend. Winner of the Toisinkoinen Literature Prize; featuring both immigrant and gender issues, of great current import.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2019
Kosovo-born Finnish novelist Statovci (My Cat Yugoslavia, 2017) returns with a beguiling story that proves the old adage about not being able to go home again--if one has a home at all."I am a man who cannot be a woman but who can sometimes look like a woman." So says 22-year-old Bujar, who, it seems, can be anything he wishes to be, of any age and gender, any guise, supported by whatever story he can spin. Even though in his new life in Rome he takes pains to disguise his Albanian origins, he carries stories from his late father about his ancestral nation and the deeds of heroes whose hearts reside "in the breast of the black two-headed eagle on the flag." Bujar lives as if he is alone, but with him is his childhood friend Agim, "a year older than me but much smaller," who is smart and soulful and who adds to Bujar's father's stock of stories with other tales, such as the curious one about a farm governed by the animals there: "Imagine, Bujar, the animals form a totalitarian society." Bujar and Agim, heroes in their own way, are a shade too young to remember the most terrible excesses of totalitarianism in their homeland, but now, away, they are free to do as they wish--but not really, because sexual violence at the hands of brutish men is always a danger everywhere they travel, and in any event they're despised for their foreignness, even if, as Bujar says, "Everybody around us wanted to be European, to belong to the European family, to stand on the other side of the invisible but insurmountable fence where people were people, at the forefront of humanity." Marginalized in several dimensions, Bujar and Agim struggle to find their identities as well as a hint of the happiness that, as events unfold, seems ever more elusive.A centrifugal story told with great sensitivity and empathy, highlighting Statovci's development as a leading voice in modern European literature.

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