The first chapter is entitled religiously God’s Rib, and is related with the sensitivity of the narrator regarding gender equality (for a deeper understanding of the meaning of which, vaguely developed in Crossing, I would suggest the reader to have fun with the work of Ziony Zevit and os baculum). With these in mind, I decided to start reading Crossing.Ĭrossing-X-ray of reader’s gestation.

Moreover, it seemed not just a book about me, but also written by my daughter (she’s almost three now and lives in Finland from last year). In addition, from the reviews, the book seemed the narration of my life: family origins from Yugoslavia (the main character’s father from Kosova, mine from Bosnia and Herzegovina) life as teenager in Albania in 1990-’91 migratory experience in Italy and now in Finland all written by someone born in 1990 and residing in Finland from 1992, when he was only two. The same obsessive treatment of the personal image ( fytyrë=face) I found in the work of Pajtim Statovci, whose “ immigrant-homoerotic-Finnish mythology” – words of Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize’s jury awarding Statovci’s first work My Cat Yugoslavia in 2014 – intrigued me, especially for his becoming a sort of Finnish-worldwide-viral literary phenomenon.Įven more intriguing were the online key words of his second novel, Tiranan Sydän ( Tirana’s Heart or Tirana’s Core, translated as Crossing, in English): “death of Enver Hoxha”, “ruins of Communist Albania”, “sexual identity”, “migration”, “heritage of Albanian myth and legend”, “human need to be seen”.

Motra Tone(1883) Kolë Idromeno, first Albanian laic painting and precursor of modernity. All what I was thinking during the reading was that in Albania, this obsessive need to control the immaculate, intact personal image is beyond past or recent socio-political experiences of the individual. Few weeks ago I was reading at a post of the Albanian author Ardian Vehbiu regarding Milan Kundera’s biography, Český život a doba, written by Jan Novak, which questioned Kundera’s “ obsessive need to control his image in part from a desire to whitewash some very dark chapters of his personal history“.

“ Occorre fare inizialmente un tale inventario.“Ĭrossing-cut.

Crossing pajtim statovci review