![]() ![]() “Oftentimes there’s a gap between the younger … and the older generation in families that have migrated from one culture to another. Bekim is Emine’s child, though you would hardly realise it from their interactions. The other, about Emine, is a realist portrayal of an Albanian mother who flees to Finland with her family during the 1980s. My Cat Yugoslavia is made up of two stories: one is a magical realist tale that follows a young, gay man – Bekim – and his relationship with a boorishly humanoid talking cat. “One day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you more,” he recalls his father saying about Finns. Bekim, his other protagonist, talks at length about growing up as an Albanian migrant in Finland. His observations on nationality, racism and migration come from his own experience, as well as the people around him. ![]() Like one of his protagonists, Emine, he fled his home for Finland with his family. He was born in Kosovo in 1990, a mere year before the first of the many Yugoslav wars broke out, and had dreamed of being a writer since boyhood: “As a child, I was sensitive and fragile to the point where I actually pretended that I was in the stories I consumed, that I led the life of their protagonists because the life in fiction was so much more interesting than I was living.”Īlthough Statovci assures me that his novel “is a work of fiction from start to finish”, he admits to including some autobiographical elements. ![]()
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