He is thoroughly obnoxious, insulting his host and then being falsely obsequious. They are both dangerous.Īs readers we don’t object to the fact of the cat, though by rights we should. The other thread features the cat and a snake, neither of which we want to take out eyes off for very long.

Two seemingly unrelated stories, one featuring a talking cat, twine and twist through the first part of the novel, both stories engrossing: a woman describes the lead-up to her traditional marriage…the clothes, the gold, the mother-to-daughter secrets, the preparations. See how the arrows in that sentence seem to point in opposite directions? Therein lies the tension. This remarkable debut by the 27-year-old Statovci gives us that strangeness, familiarity, differentness, and similarity in a wild ride from Kosovo to Finland, from traditional society to an open society, from cultural acceptance to social ostracism. All that has changed now and I couldn't be happier. I was eager to hear it all, but such stories, if they existed, were rarely published in the U.S.

Cold, white, communal, with few racial or religious tensions. They’d started out somewhere I’d never been, and they’d arrived somewhere they’d never imagined. Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could understand. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love-which he will find in the most unexpected place. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. Then, during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably-he is terrified of snakes-he lets roam his apartment. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. A love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat.

Kissani yugoslavia