You might think that Pajtim Statovci pre-qualifies as an original voice. My Cat Yugoslavia (Pantheon), the debut novel by this 26-year-old Kosovan refugee to Finland, just issued in a splendid English translation by David Hackston, could have slipped comfortably into any number of currently fad-ish subgenres (or even into the currently out-of-fashion magical realism category) and found a publisher and an audience. In the original Finnish and the 11 languages into which his 2014 novel has previously been translated, it has. Just not comfortably.
Anyone who writes as naturally and powerfully as Statovci surely has models, but they're not apparent in My Cat Yugoslavia, and he's one of those rare performers in language who puts you out of mind of all others while you're reading his charged, bounding prose. He betrays no more interest in being stuffed into a pigeonhole than his protagonist Bekim's pet boa constrictor is in being put back into the heated glass terrarium its thoughtful owner has bought for its comfort.
As the reader will have surmised, the novel itself is a glass menagerie that includes two, not just one, actual snakes and a pride of cats, the bulk of them also real. But then there's Yugoslavia. OK, you may think momentarily of early Guenter Grass as Bekim meets the larger-than-life Yugoslavia, in a gay bar where the black-and-white feline, standing tall on its hind legs, is making the scene, flirting and dancing and playing hard to get. Only after finally being taken home by Bekim, does he get candid �" vociferous, you might say �" about how he loathes gay men (and, hilariously, despises people who see things only in black-and-white).
Before we know that Yugoslavia goes home with Bekim because he is otherwise homeless, he tells the "astounded" Bekim, "Gays. I don't much like gays." He has "nothing against homosexuality" of course, but, "Obviously, I like all kinds of toms, but I hate bitches." The cat moves in, promptly turning Bekim into his house slave, Yugoslavia losing his figure eating pistachios in bed, his "master" doting until, predictably if not inevitably, Yugoslavia moves out, cursing the scorched earth (and gruesomely slain boa constrictor) behind him.
As a child, Bekim is plagued by nightmares, and I fear bringing some on myself by venturing an "interpretation" of Yugoslavia, the kind of character who resists being reduced to a symbol. Still, since he dominates the first third of the novel, you have to wonder. I think it's not an accident that this grabbing pussy is named for Bekim's homeland before the fall of Tito and the rise of Milosevic, literally Balkanizing the country into warring and factions and states-to-be.
Revelations about the current horror in Chechnya hint at how nightmarish being gay must have been in that milieu, but it's telling that Statovci doesn't make that case per se. The author's real Muslim family fled to Finland when he was two, and the only prejudice he talks about is of being a refugee in a country where he tries to pass as Michael or John so he won't have to say where he is from.
This brings us to the book's humans, equals perhaps nowhere else than in the pages of this many-specied book. Statovci tells his story in a layered (but easy to follow) double narrative, shuffling the deck of his own angst with that of his mother Emine, as sympathetic a character as he could have created, breathing life into the dirt of riven lands. We meet her as she is about to be married to the rich, handsome, hairy, scary Bajram, who jumps the gun on the finale of the traditional days-long Kosovan marriage tradition and prematurely sexually traumatizes his virgin wife (who, no slouch in the brains and self-survival departments, and tutored by her mother, has tucked into the armpit of her wedding dress a razor blade with which she can cut her hand to make sure she also bleeds copiously when her hymen is torn).
It's the marriage you'd expect, but in a move of impressive narrative suavity, the author brings the two narratives together when his mother finds comfort with a real stray cat. With minimum self-pity, Bekim narrates growing up in a family that first discovers that you can go home again only with great discomfort, and finally, that you can't go home again.
His fraught relationship with his father �" and a cultural homophobia so thick in the air it doesn't have to be named �" results in flawed, broken, desultory "intimate" relationships with men and maybe, just maybe, a viable reunion with Sami, the best of them. It's a ninth life beyond Yugoslavia's hissed parting curse, "No one will ever love you."
It's hardly surprising that there's a surge in topical fiction in a world writhing with its largest refugee population ever. If in too few other lands, and hearts, there's a place for them in this remarkable book.