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My Cat Yugoslavia

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My Cat Yugoslavia

By: Pajtim Statovci
Narrated by: Ben Allen
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In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a near stranger, and the match quickly turns sour. Shortly thereafter, the country is torn apart by war and they flee to Finland, where her son Bekim grows up to become a social outcast, a foreigner, and a gay man in an unaccepting society. His only true companion is a boa constrictor that he lets roam around his apartment.©2014 Pajtim Statovci (P)2017 W.F. Howes Ltd Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Magical Realism Magic
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I thought this was a very good novel, with a lot of great narrative flourishes. it evokes a lot from the Kosovan and Finnish settings and gives a very powerful sense of the refugee experience through generations.

Ben Allen has a great whack at the dual narrator structure, a really good listen.

Smart, gripping and sad

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amazing affective turn novel, a story I had never come across before. Both gripping and influentional.

amazing

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This is a refugee story, about the lives within a family and interspersed with the dynamics of the 1st-person protagonist's magic/ surreal relationships with a cat-human, and with his pet snake. The Yugoslavian writer is depressed, feels somewhat disconnected with his new adopted country of Finland. He has attachment issues and is prone to self-hate. He is also quite frustrating as he oftens behaves badly, sometimes towards the animals. The cat-human character, seemingly representing the self-hate he internalised from his father and homophobic Yugoslavian cultural heritage just felt like he'd never spent time with a feline. While I can empathise with the negative feeling, especially at his age, I am older and was bored by the miserable tone and found it not especially rewarding. I like complexity and original writing, however his disconnection from the world makes it a bit flat for me.
The reader may make the book work for others, but I found his separate falsetto and gruff tone for the protagonist's parents got very grating.

Sad, quirky story of refugee's disconnection

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