Bujar spends most of his time with a neighbor boy, Agim, with whom he has an intense, ambiguously romantic relationship that will haunt the rest of his life. This social dissolution mirrors the dissolution of Bujar’s family: his father dies of cancer his mother becomes bedridden his sister disappears.

Food lines stretch outside churches and mosques Bujar watches for human traffickers who snatch children from the streets. In one, he recounts his adolescence in Tirana, as Albania plunges into chaos after the fall of the Communist dictatorship. (Both novels were translated, from the Finnish, by David Hackston.) Each thread is narrated by Bujar. “Crossing” has none of its predecessor’s surreal whimsy, but it, too, proceeds along dual narrative paths that appear in alternating sections. Statovci, like Bekim, immigrated to Finland as a child, but the book was hardly autofiction: its most remarkable character is a sexy and abusive talking cat, with whom Bekim lives for months in an increasingly untenable ménage. The book was striking for its juxtaposition of wildly heterogeneous styles, intertwining the life story of a young woman in an unhappy marriage in Kosovo with that of her son, Bekim, a student in Helsinki. Statovci was widely praised for his first novel, “ My Cat Yugoslavia,” which was published in 2014, when he was twenty-four.

He has become “a ghost living at the edge of my shadows.” “This is not my life, these days are not mine,” he says to himself. As he searches for a stretch of road where cars pick up speed, he meditates on the waste of his youthful promise, and on a sense of shame so strong that it drives him to scrub the stains of other people’s urine and excrement from public bathrooms, so that no one will think he left them. We later learn that his name is Bujar, that he is Albanian, and that his desire to die stems not from anxiety about his gender identity-the novel subjects the very idea of identity to caustic interrogation-but from the isolation and humiliations that he has faced as a refugee from the turmoil in the Balkans.

At the start of “ Crossing” (Pantheon), Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a twenty-two-year-old man, dressed in denim shorts and a padded bra-“a man who cannot be a woman but who can sometimes look like a woman”-throws himself in front of traffic on a street in Rome in 1998.

Crossing pajtim statovci review