Kosovo: My Cat Yugoslavia, by Pajtim Statovci

I could have managed without reading a book by a Kosovan author, as it is only a partially recognised state. (It is recognized by 113 UN member nations, but not fully recognized by Serbia, from which it claims independence).

However, this book kept popping up on my radar, and it looked interesting, so when I spotted it on the library shelves I decided to give it a go. The narrator, Bekim, is a Kosovan refugee in Finland, where his family fled when he was a child. He is now living on his own apart from his pet boa constrictor, which he allows to roam his apartment, even though he is terrified of snakes.

Then one night in a gay bar, he meets a talking cat, who moves in with him. What evolves from that meeting is a journey in which Bekim eventually returns to Kosovo to confront his past.

I initially thought that the cat of the title was Bekim's companion, the talking cat. But nowhere in the book is he mentioned by name, and there are other cats - the small black cat who becomes the companion of Bekim's mother, Emine, after she leaves her husband, and the cat that Bekim briefly adopts in Kosovo, although cats are despised animals there. It seemed in the end that the cat of the title is a metaphor for the whole of Yugoslavia, although it would be hard for me to put the comparison into words, as to how the narrator is explicitly comparing his troubled country to a cat.

This is the story of Bekim's mother, Emine, as much as it is Bekim's story, from her marriage at the age of 16 to a young man who is handsome and wealthy, but whom she scarcely knows. Despite being unsure at first, I found it thoroughly absorbing.

Pajtim Statovci himself left Kosovo for Finland at the age of two, which made me have reservations about the suitability of this book to represent the country. Nevertheless, it is a book as much, or more, about Kosovo as about refugees in Finland.

My Cat Yugoslavia won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize in the category Best Debut, in 2014. It has been translated into 11 languages and was published in English by Pushkin Press. It was translated from Finnish by David Hackston.