He slipped his hand under my shirt, his thick, curved fingers gripped my bare skin, his teeth nibbled my lower lip, and he stood in front of me smiling. They are called "My eldest son, my daughter, my youngest son" The experience of being a brown refugee in a lily white country was scathing and accurate.The following evening, he handed me a plastic bag and kissed me just the way he had before, as though six months hadn’t changed a thing. Interestingly, she never refers to her children by their names. Even at the end of the book I was not sure she was able to appreciate the layers of cognitive dissonance that bamboozled her children. Emine's character vacillated between bright but too victimized to be functional to passively permitting Bajram's abuse.
How that mother (Emine)was able to survive with him for twenty years speaks to the subjugation of women in that part of the world. His intensity made him a fascinating if horrific presence. However, his presence in the story sears out of the book. What made him such an out of control violent abuser? This was never made clear. the father, Bajram, was an incompletely developed beast. It was, however, a perfect characterization of a feline. was it a metaphor or a literal cat? I have no idea. I have no idea what the talking cat was all about. Either it improved as the novel progressed or I became so caught up that I was more able to understand the meaning of what was being expressed. I feel like translator didn't adequately communicate Pajtim Statovci's words in the first couple chapters. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally to open himself to true love - which he will find in the most unexpected place.Ĭruelty thru generations exacerbated by war It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. Then, during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably - he is terrified of snakes - he lets roam his apartment.
Years later her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war, and she and her family flee. In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. A love story set in two countries in two radically different moments in time, bringing together a young man, his mother, a boa constrictor, and one capricious cat.
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