...a strange, haunting and utterly original exploration of displacement and desire ... I am happy to report that Statovci’s cat manages to mark its own literary turf. Its ostentatiousness and absurdity make Behemoth look comparably stable ... Such a dazzling figure can make other aspects of a narrative seem tame. At certain points, the novel loses some of its wild, wonderful energy. Nuanced interiority gives way to action — sometimes, unnecessarily, in the third person ... Statovci’s literary gifts are prodigious. His sentences are lean and precise. He defies expectation, denies explanation, and excels at the most difficult aspect of storytelling: building a complex humanity for even his most deplorable characters. He does not pretend to offer a journey that every reader will appreciate. But that is part of his magic, and in all the ways that matter, My Cat Yugoslavia is a marvel, a remarkable achievement, and a world apart from anything you are likely to read this year.
...compelling and altogether beautiful debut ... This image of a talking cat within human society is also a way of examining the displacement and denigration that comes with being a Muslim Kosovar refugee in Western society, and a queer person in a culture with certain sexual and gender norms ... Perhaps because this is a literary debut, Statovci’s magical realism and use of symbolism can sometimes come across as heavy-handed...Still, My Cat Yugoslavia is inventive and playful. It tells us a great deal about what it might feel like to be an outcast twice-over, to be at the bottom of the heap not just in one society but two ... My Cat Yugoslavia’s is also elevated by the quality of the writing (aided, to be sure, by David Hackston’s elegant translation from the original Finnish). There is something truly wonderful about a debut novel where the sentences themselves are as beguiling, the metaphors as imaginative, and the eye for detail as sharp as Statovci’s.
My Cat Yugoslavia draws on this compounded experience of exile to tell two parallel stories; it reads as a life reflected by flawed and foggy mirrors ... My Cat Yugoslavia is spry and warm at first, but it hardens, becoming emotionally icier, until Bekim and his mother reach parallel breaking points...This chilliness put me off at first; the novel’s coldness made me feel cold to it. But, as I kept reading, its mood and style began to make sense. The novel is a slowly shattering and re-forming reflection of the protagonists’ corresponding descents into wintry numbness, until, near the end, they begin to revive, and to love ... Statovci’s surreal, arresting novel suggests that we must look anyway, and that love and identity have many reflections, many destinies, many languages. Sometimes, a broken mirror reflects something truer—as does the kind of love, drawn from the deepest sunken places, that tries to put it back together.
My Cat Yugoslavia was published in its original Finnish in 2014, when Statovci was in his early twenties, and his age shows here. It's a brash and ambitious novel, but too often Statovci lets his ideas get the better of him — he definitely has something to say about abuse, prejudice and family dynamics, but it's lost in the sheer absurdity of the story. The book reads like two novels shoehorned into one, and neither one is fully realized ... That's not to say that Statovci is an untalented writer. He's clearly capable of constructing strong sentences, and it's undeniable that his imagination is boundless. It wouldn't be surprising if his next book succeeds where this one fails. But My Cat Yugoslavia, though clever in parts, is, unfortunately, too unpolished and immature to be considered anything more than a valiant attempt.
...an elegant, allegorical portrait of lives lived at the margin, minorities within minorities in a new land ... Statovci doesn’t quite make full use of his fantastic cat; though he invests his creation with plenty of personality, Statovci lacks Mikhail Bulgakov’s flair for satirical meaning-making through the use of animal characters. As it is, though, the creature turns out to be a complex character, tormented as well as a tormentor. And that’s not to speak of Bekim’s pet snake, who has dangerous ideas of his own. Allegorical but matter-of-fact: a fine debut, layered with meaning and shades of sorrow.
...The chapters featuring Bekim’s mother, beginning in 1980 when she was 15 years old, powerfully reveal her strained marriage to a traditional, domineering man and her endless domestic responsibilities ... But the thread following adult Bekim is far more difficult to track ... While the story of the family is compelling, the juxtaposition with the talking cat becomes a jarring counterpoint, interfering with the otherwise important exploration of the aftershocks of war.
