Even though I didn’t have my own memories of life in Kosovo, to my peers I became the face of my culture as the media kept covering the stories of tragedy and violence. In this book there’s a fair amount of fear, violence, desperation and unfulfilment, which stems from a sense of not belonging, and shame.Īt the age of seven I started attending a Finnish school. In Crossing I wanted to tell a more rational story. But operating inside the universe of a magic realist novel can be hard for both writer and reader: it’s so easy to get lost in the pool of metaphors. There’s something very liberating about magic realism. Why did you turn away from magic realism in Crossing? Your first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia, featured a racist, homophobic talking cat. In 2018 Statovci won the Helsinki writer of the year award. In a review in the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell compared its main character, a pathological liar who exploits assumptions about victimhood, to “another queer criminal, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley”. In 2016 he won the Toisinkoinen literature prize, awarded for second novels, with Crossing, the story of two teenage boys trying to leave post-communist Albania. His first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the prestigious Helsingin Sanomat literature prize for the best Finnish debut. Pajtim Statovci, born in 1990, is a Finnish-Kosovan novelist who moved from Kosovo to Finland with his family when he was two years old.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |