Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990; his family emigrated to Finland just as the genocidal assault on Bosnia began, and later Kosovo. A Finnish-language writer of Kosovan-Albanian heritage, Statovci works at a fertile imaginative confluence that allows him the multiple perspective of the outsider-insider.
His creepy 2017 debut My Cat Yugoslavia featured a pet python and a talking cat with whom the self-loathing protagonist, son of Kosovan immigrants, has an ambiguous relationship. It also included a vivid coming-of-age backstory about a young Kosovan, with a narrative of clan politics and brutal sexual awakening. It won awards in Finland and was compared with Let the Right One In for its subversive take on intimacy. It is a novel that gets under your skin.
Crossing packs a still more devastating punch: it is the work of an accomplished novelist. The book expands and complicates Statovci’s central theme of youthful revolt – against conventional belonging, pre-determined identities, nationalities, families, origins, against life as a tyranny foretold. The key setting is Albania (the Finnish title is Tiranan Sydan, “Heart of Tirana”), and the predicament of the ambiguous hero, Bujar, is rooted in the harsh fate of his homeland. Like My Cat Yugoslavia, on one level the novel follows a coming-of-age narrative, involving Bujar and his brilliant cross-dressing friend Agim, who are growing up at the end of Enver Hoxha’s 40-year dictatorship.
As post-communist Albania slides into social collapse, with children being sold into slavery, organ-harvesting and prostitution (this is not dystopian fiction – it was reality), the two boys feel that “we lived in a place that time could not reach ... Europe’s rubbish dump, Europe’s backyard, Europe’s largest open prison”. The only consolation left is to smoke ceaselessly, or risk their lives by emigrating illegally to Greece or Italy.
When Bujar’s father dies, his sister is kidnapped by sex traffickers and his mother is unhinged by grief, the boys run away from home and live on the streets of Tirana and coastal Durrës. Their dream is “Europe”. After a year of selling cigarettes, they buy a rowing boat and set off across the Adriatic. It is the 1990s. But this is also a story for now, the story of any refugee bound for Europe, leaving behind uninhabitable landscapes, third-class citizenships and expired identities – because in exile there is no history, only the stark present.
Alternating with the Albanian scenes, which are the heart of the story, are chapters set years later, where Bujar starts from zero each time in different cities, from Rome to New York. But with the cruel logic of exile, he can only see his life “from the outside”. His shame about his origins forces him to wear fictional identities like masks, and ultimately to betray those other also vulnerable outsiders who get close to him. He has a set of nationalities, families and gender identities: sometimes he is a “beautiful woman” from Sarajevo whom men are drawn to, only to be repulsed at the moment of realisation. Sometimes he is a Spanish man with whom women fall in love – only to be rejected by the reluctant Bujar, who remains a hostage to his past. Sometimes he sounds like Agim, as if the two are fused. This double perspective (also present in the alternating voices of mother and son in My Cat Yugoslavia) is disorienting, but the enmeshment of identities is essential to the story and resolved with unbearable poignancy in the stunning final pages.
Bujar and Agim live in a state of banishment, yet they are ablaze with youth and desire. This tips them into the dark realm of the mythical, rendered through versions of Albanian folk stories, but done with Statovci’s subversive humour – the myths too are oppressively clannish and gendered. The only escape comes through seeing things afresh: a nurse’s thumb is “penis-shaped”, Balkan village houses look “like the heads of people drowning” and Bujar-Agim fantasises about jumping from the mythical Albanian Highland ridge, “wearing the high heel, in a land where no one will ever set foot”.
At the funeral of Bajram’s father in “unfinished” rural Kosovo, there is “a dark void in the middle of a day drenched in sunlight, the sound of men breathing heavily as though they were witnessing a solar eclipse and were afraid of entering a world of endless dusk”. The book is alive with such wonderful gothic scenes, a visceral sense of alienation and desire. With considerable literary panache, Statovci treads a line between raw tragedy (the boys’ tormented bodies and hearts are a microcosm of a collective agony) and a more formal aesthetic of abjection bordering on existential horror, in the best European literary-philosophical tradition from Camus to Kafka, Kadare to Kristeva. The sensitivity and poetry of David Hackston’s translation match the original.
Statovci’s brilliance is primarily as an intuitive storyteller, though there is the occasional overdose of narcissistic misery (there are only so many cities where Bujar can act out). Yet as that other exile Emil Cioran said: “The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become – I even discern some relationship between misfortune and megalomania.”
Crossing finds new ways of bringing the question of who belongs, and who is cast out, to an exquisitely painful point. This is an archetypal human issue we must all face in this century, if not individually then as communities. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The brutal beauty of Crossing comes from its almost cellular understanding of belonging and exclusion, love and cruelty. It is a powerful phoenix of a book that rises from the ashes of the previous century. It speaks to the sins of the fathers, which the children must transcend by crossing to the other side – or perish.
