It is, in short, not a book for which I am the ideal reader, but it is an objectively impressive achievement. But at its most effective, it combines the playful weirdness of Murakami with the satirical wit of Bulgakov, and tops it off with a style and an aesthetic that’s reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You. My Cat Yugoslavia is a delicate, highly constructed book, full of symbolism and surrealism, and as such the story can feel difficult to connect with. Bekim’s sense of displacement and awareness of the hatred directed at him from native-born Finns is surely based on personal experience-though the rest of the novel, in which Bekim, friendless and living alone, buys a pet snake and shacks up with a large and abusive talking cat, is surely not. Statovci, too, was born in Kosovo and now lives in Finland.
Pajtim Statovci’s debut novel, like a lot of debut novels, has some parallels with the writer’s own life: it focuses on a young gay man living in Finland named Bekim, whose family moved from Kosovo during that country’s political unrest in the late 1980s. We should come up with another word for evil, and that name should be laziness. The Great Reread, #5: I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith.April 2023: superlatives for the rest of it.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.
The Great Reread, #6: Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer.
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