My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston

Hardcover, 272 pages Pub April 18th 2017 by Pantheon Books (first published 2014) Orig Title Kissani Jugoslavia ISBN13: 9781101871829 Literary AwardsHelsingin Sanomien kirjallisuuspalkinto (2014)

Years ago I remember wishing I could experience a bit of what immigrants experience, or that some could communicate their experiences in ways I could understand. They’d started out somewhere I’d never been, and they’d arrived somewhere they’d never imagined. Like Finland. Cold, white, communal, with few racial or religious tensions. I was eager to hear it all, but such stories, if they existed, were rarely published in the U.S. All that has changed now and I couldn't be happier.

This remarkable debut by the 27-year-old Statovci gives us that strangeness, familiarity, differentness, and similarity in a wild ride from Kosovo to Finland, from traditional society to an open society, from cultural acceptance to social ostracism. See how the arrows in that sentence seem to point in opposite directions? Therein lies the tension.

Two seemingly unrelated stories, one featuring a talking cat, twine and twist through the first part of the novel, both stories engrossing: a woman describes the lead-up to her traditional marriage…the clothes, the gold, the mother-to-daughter secrets, the preparations. The other thread features the cat and a snake, neither of which we want to take out eyes off for very long. They are both dangerous.

As readers we don’t object to the fact of the cat, though by rights we should. He is thoroughly obnoxious, insulting his host and then being falsely obsequious. He comes for a tryst and stays for meal, which he then refuses on the grounds such food would never cross his lips. He insists on eating meat in a vegetarian’s house, and he takes long, splashy showers…he is your worst nightmare, the height of self-regard.

The snake—I’d like to hear your take on the snake. A boa constrictor. He’s a wily one, seems to have formed a kind of attachment to his owner, in that he doesn’t threaten him, but he does threaten a guest…Throw a dangerous animal into a story and see if your attention flags. It’s a old trick that works every time. We don’t take our eyes from him whenever he appears from behind the couch.

But it is the story of the wedding that grabs us by the balls, as the expression goes. We are shocked, distressed, angry. We try to imagine how we would handle what comes up, both as a young person, and as an adult. We think over decisions we make so quickly, painlessly in adulthood that are so tortuous and fraught in youth.

All this is overlaid with the portrait of a family of seven living in one room provided by the Finnish government to refugees. The bunk-beds squeak so cannot be used. Mattresses cover the floor. Four or more families share a kitchen, a bathroom. It is nearly intolerable until they remember what they left, native Albanians in a Kosovo run amok. The Bosnian War was brutal beyond all imagining. There is that.

The stories twist and twine through one another like the loops of a snake, another of which, a poisonous viper, makes an appearance later in the book. The viper is only a meter long, and is captured in a plastic bag. It doesn’t provoke as much anxiety as it should. When a plastic bag reappears later in the story, holding not a snake but a book, The White King by György Dragomán, we wonder…can the snake represent his father, the bully whose influence stays around, silently inhabiting the places we live? Deadly, but sometimes ineffective, who might be deflected or exorcised with understanding and effort.

And the cat? There is more than one cat. The first cat talks. The second cat was abandoned, uncared for, unloved in the native country until rescued and restored to health. And finally, there is the black cat in a litter, “just normal, mongrel kittens,” in the author’s words, to distinguish them from the black and white cat who speaks, and the orange cat who doesn’t. The talking cat so full of himself could be the author himself, and the follow-on cats could be those who’d suffered during the war, coming finally to the children, those ‘normal’ integrated ‘mongrels’ who’d adjusted to their new environment in their adopted country and married with locals.

The disturbing shifting sexuality throughout this novel, in a person from a traditional culture with unresolved parent issues, has a touch of intimidation and coercion about it, in the beginning at least. By the end I am much more comfortable that our narrator’s sexual choices are healthy ones, and begin to wonder…is this one of the things that caused the rift between his father and himself?

Statovci succeeds in capturing our attention with this debut, recounting an agonizing childhood and an adulthood filled with sudden emotional traps. His use of a female point of view is extraordinarily effective in making us inhabit her choices. He shows us the distance an émigré may feel from his host country, no matter how conflicted these feelings are with gratefulness and surprise and ordinary, daily joy at being alive. He shows us the pointed, hateful bullying in town—a step up from ordinary schoolyard bullying—that may provoke withdrawal rather than a healthy resistance and reliance on home-grown values.

This is a thrilling debut. Bravo!

Below is a clip from the Penguin Random House audio production:





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The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger

Hardcover, 432 pages Published January 19th 2016 by Other Press

Twenty years after the massacre of 263 men, boys, and one woman at Vukovar, the centuries-old Croatian town alongside the Danube, Goran Hadžić was captured and extradited to the Hague, last on a list of 161 indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It was a fifteen year manhunt filled with big personalities, creative surveillance techniques, much double dealing, and the leaking of sensitive documents which allowed many of the indicted to initially slip their would-be captors. Intelligence services of several nations both cooperated and obstructed each other and the small intelligence arm of the ICTY at different times, depending on the priorities of their individual services, on the egos of their team leaders, and to ensure no casualties on their own teams would cause consternation in their home countries. Borger brings the manhunt to life in stunning detail yet with a reporter’s distance, allowing us to see the curve of the investigation and what the Hague trials ultimately meant for the survivors of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia.

The overwhelming majority of those indicted for war crimes were men, and yet two women did more than anyone else to ensure those on the list were tracked down: Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte, both chief prosecutors for ICTY at different times. Borger shows how their contrasting prosecutorial styles and strategies were instrumental in imposing maximum pressure on reluctant governments to search for and apprehend those responsible for the crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

In the process of highlighting the men most responsible for the genocide in Yugoslavia and recounting the search for their henchmen, Borger gives us an overview. of the history of the region and snapshots of the worst atrocities. Many of those accused of crimes against humanity stayed in positions of power in the states newly formed after the fall of Yugoslavia, going about their business, literally, without fear. In perhaps the most banal of captures, Mitar Vasiljević, a former waiter-turned-paramilitary terrorist of his town’s Bosniak majority, was captured when French intelligence rented an apartment Vasiljević owned, seizing him when he came to collect the monthly rent.

The ICTY tracking team experienced only one truly voluntary surrender: Vojislav Šešelj was founder of the far right nationalist Serbian Radical Party and was accused of recruiting brutal paramilitary groups to carry out ethnic cleansing. He arrived at ICTY’s Belgrade outpost one day with a suitcase, demanding to know who was going to pay for his ticket to the Hague. Šešelj had cancer and was released in 2014 for treatment in Serbia, his case not yet settled.

Borger includes lessons learned by special forces in the laboratory of the Balkans, shares the story of a hairpin turn and the cognitive dissonance theory of a gorilla suit, and liberally seeds his reportage with names we recognize, including a younger David Petraeus taking small roles in intelligence or capture and learning lessons he will go on to use as commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Polish, French, British, American and even German special forces had teams doing investigations, some more effectively than others.

This nonfiction is so filled with criminals and covert attempts at capture that the reality of the vast genocide in the region begins to take a backseat to the ludicrous wealth of storytelling possibilities, whether it be for film or fiction. The history is tailor-made for a long-running film series allowing one to see into the twists and turns human reason takes when nationalism, religion, guns, and power converge.

Borger makes the case that vast military resources of participating countries searching for the war criminals were not as effective as a small band of dedicated and resourceful investigators hired by the ICTY to pursue leads, one example of need for focus rather than overwhelming strength. Participating countries’ intelligence services were often victims of false leads and misinformation, and their mandate to eliminate risk ensured every high-profile capture was accompanied by too much of everything, an embarrassment of riches.

As a test case for criminal prosecution of war criminals, the ICTY could be said to have succeeded, finally, though several of those convicted of terrible crimes have already been released back to their home countries, having served two-thirds of their sentences. In some cases, the sentences of some high-ranking defendants were reversed:

"Under the leadership of an American judge, Theodor Meron, an eighty-three-year-old Holocaust survivor and former Israeli diplomat, the new judgments significantly raised the threshold of proof needed to convict political leaders. It was no longer enough to demonstrate that senior officers had control over the units who committed mass murder."

Apparently American and Israeli governments were concerned that their generals would be indicted one day for backing armed rebels or insurgents in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Governments are being forced to recognize and acknowledge where their actions come dangerously close to crimes against humanity.

Julian Borger covered the Bosnian War for the BBC and The Guardian. He is currently diplomatic editor at The Guardian.


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Elegy for Kosovo by Ismail Kadare, translated by Peter Constantine

This short and devastating novel of the year 1389 in the region of the Balkan Peninsula is in the form of three stories. A great battle commenced in late June of 1389 in which the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Albanian and Hungarian troops were routed by the Turks. The Turkish Sultan, Murad I, and his eldest son were believed to be murdered by their own troops because of a difference in opinion about the direction of the empire. Murad’s blood was spilled on that plain in Kosovo, nourishing the ancient hatreds that grew there like weeds.

"These tales bring to mind the Greek tragedies," [the Great Lady] said in a low voice. “They are of the same diamond dust, the same seed."
"What are these Greek tragedies?" the lord of the castle asked.
She sighed deeply and said that they were perhaps the greatest wealth of mankind. A simple treasure chest, like the one in which any feudal lord hides his gold coins…"

Told in simple and elegant prose, the story relates these ancient hatreds and impresses upon the reader how the oral traditions of the martial minstrels of the region managed to keep the conflict immortal with their songs.

Ismail Kadare, born in 1936, is Muslim by birth in an area of Albania that was primarily Christian. In a 1998 Paris Review interview, Kadare talks a little about the Albanian language and its literary traditions—how it had been mostly oral.

The wide-ranging interview is helpful in understanding what Kadare was saying in this novel. When it was written in the 1990s, the plains of Kosovo were again suffering under the onslaught of warring factions attacking each other "like beasts freed from their iron chains." Kadare had much experience writing under repressive regimes: he studied writing in the USS, and later published work under the regime of Hoxha in Albania.

In a review published in Britain’s The Independent in 1999, Kadare says that "personal freedom for the writer is not so important. It is not individual freedom that guarantees the greatness of literature…" We know this to be true, of course, though literature can also be nourished in a less repressive atmosphere. Kadare took the route of writing elliptical allegorical pieces that were more difficult to interpret, like Chinese writers have been forced to do for decades. In fact, Kadare’s work was so elliptical, some reviewers could mistake his meaning for support of the repressive regime.

Kadare claims this was never his intention. Maria Margaronis, who writes for The Nation, suggests in a review for the online magazine EXPLORINGfictions Kadare’s “Great Lady” in this novel was in fact Madeline Albright, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the war in Yugoslavia, and that Kadare was again writing allegorically and elliptically a support of U.S. intervention to stop the war. Maragonis goes on to say

"But Kadare, of all writers, was uniquely well placed to express in fiction the contradictions facing his people in the post-cold war world. Instead his has chosen to continue the old game, throwing in his lot with those who see the Balkans as a cauldron of atavistic hatreds while claiming favored status for his own tribe. In the long run, this does the Albanians no favors."

Let’s say this: Kadare writes fiction eloquently, clearly, and persuasively. I hope to look further into his work.

A note on the translation: it was done by the incomparable Peter Constantine, who deserves full kudos for retaining the beauty of the writing.


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The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Everything about the concept of this debut novel intrigued me: a disgraced and demoted second-generation Canadian Muslim police investigator, Khattuck, finds himself investigating the suspicious death of a man who turns out to be the Bosnian Serb war criminal, Dražen Krstić. Krstić had changed his name to Christopher Drayton and had settled into a life of comfort in Toronto. The NYT had just such a story leading their (3.1.15) Sunday edition last week, so we know it is entirely plausible that Bosnian war criminals have settled into new, lucrative lives in the U.S. and Canada, lost in the shuffle of refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

The author, Ausma Zehanat Khan, is a British-born Canadian with a Ph.D. in international human rights law, specializing in military intervention and war crimes in the Balkans. Khan has an undeniable street cred when detailing the conflict in Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Therefore it pains me to say that The Unquiet Dead does not really work as a novel (or at least a good novel). This will not stop anyone interested in the topic from having a look at this, but it may prepare you for a difficult fiction-reading experience.

All the ingredients for a long-lived policier are there: an interesting and troubled minority investigator and his unlikely sidekick, a twenty-something white woman called Rachel. Her background has the requisite complexities: childhood of poverty, abusive father, estranged brother, crazy mother. But somehow the whole doesn’t hang straight. Characters lack verisimilitude and dimension; conversation has an invented quality. For instance, what twenty-something police investigator earning a good wage would continue to live with mad parents on the off-chance a brother who had left seven years before could only contact her at her childhood home? I heard Khan’s explanation but it doesn’t work. If the boy had wits enough to survive seven years in the wilds of the world, he should be able to trace her whereabouts in her home town of Toronto.

Quotes of statements from reports, letters, tribunals, witnesses, the Qur’an head the chapters and are interspersed throughout the parallel story of the investigation and are given fuller explanation in her Notes at the back of the book. Some chapters feature long seemingly remembered but, I suspect, invented passages that bear witness to the events in the torn Yugoslavia. The horror of the events there are undeniable. I found it difficult to keep my skittering eyes on the page. Since we have heard something of these events, reference to them alone strikes one with terror and fear. Since fiction is suspect in what it reveals, perhaps this information would be better presented elsewhere.

Perhaps Khan thought we wouldn’t be interested if she published a separate book of nonfiction about the events at Srbrenica. She raises some very relevant and thought-provoking issues: was the international arms embargo to the Bosnian territorial units responsible for the horrific intensification of violence because one side had an inability to defend themselves against the side that had the former Yugoslav army matériel? One might make an opposite argument: that supplying weapons to one side or the other could intensify the violence of the fighting. Another issue she touches upon is the inability of Immigration departments in the West to locate and bring to justice known war criminals and fugitives from justice. These are worthy subjects of study and discussion. They can fit in a fiction, but everything else has to work as well.

The successful writing of fiction is a difficult enterprise. What surprised me was not that Khan did not succeed, but that she came so close to managing it. The ingredients for a brilliant policier are there, including an important and relevant subject of investigation. She just needed the example of a few more classics of the genre, to get help with conversation and depth of character development, and to trust her readers to have a sense of discomfiture when the word "Bosnia" is mentioned. We’ll get the real details of the events in Srbrenica elsewhere if she mentions them tangentially rather than head-on.

I have long mused on the difficulty of bringing real-life events by known scholars to the world of fiction. One wonders why the authors make the switch. If it is because they want to inform us mostly, I think they might run into difficulty. If it is because they really want to write fiction—important, relevant fiction—the endeavor will take all they have and more. I love important, relevant fiction, so I am going to encourage them. Brava, Khan!


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The Heart of Hell by Alen Mattich

Autumn, 1991. The sounds, the scents, the light and look of Croatia come through clearly in this best-by-far third installment of the Marko della Torre mystery series. “Wild thyme and lavender, pine resin and a faint fragrance of the sea” waft around della Torre as he plans a middle-of-the-night sailboat crossing from the island of Korčula to Dubrovnik in the middle of the Yugoslav blockade of that walled city on the Dalmatian coast.

Della Torre is a senior member of the newly-formed Croatian military intelligence, but with a government in disarray and the former Yugoslavia breaking into component countries at the hands of vengeful and land-grabbing combatants, no knowledge, no ‘friend’ was firm, steady, or sure. Della Torre is out of his depth much of the time in this novel, tossed about physically and emotionally by his alliances with the untrustworthy.

We follow della Torre in his rented Citroën from almost-winter in Zagreb (“a green city, pocket-sized, and close to wilderness”) to late summer in Rijeka, close to Croatia’s northwestern coast and the “beautiful Venetian city” of Poreč. He drives south along the coast road hoping to find a way into Dubrovnik despite the Yugoslav blockade. He travels to Herveg Novi in Montenegro before he leaves the south for Belgrade and Vukovar in his search for reasons why the CIA is so interested in his movements and involved in his affairs.

Mattich has the heart of a novelist (or travel writer), though his other life as Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal financial reporter may leave him little time or energy for creating characters that stand up for what is right in the war-torn Balkans. This third novel in the Marko della Torre series is a heady mix of spy thriller and war reporting along the crystalline Adriatic. The morally complex characters keep our wits sharpened: we don’t quite trust anyone but time and again these characters surprise us with their generosity, humor, grit and drive. Especially notable in this novel is Strumbić, a man who lives large in his role as policeman, prisoner, fixer, smuggler, thief, and friend to Marko della Torre.

We hear the canny Wall Street insider behind Strumbić’s words to della Torre about money and risk:

“Gringo, when you grow up using chestnut leaves to wipe your ass, the man with an indoor toilet is rich. You’re right, though, I’ve got enough. The money is neither here nor there. But I’m not a gambler. For one thing, real gambling is putting something on the line you can’t afford to lose, and the odds aren’t particularly good. Think about things that way and you realize you’re the gambler, Gringo. For me, mostly it’s an intellectual challenge. Like Dubrovnik. How many cigarettes do you stock up on? How many should you sell? Or do you wait for the price to go higher? Do you dump your holdings when people find out the armada’s coming to save them? Or do you pay some docker in Split to unload all the cigarettes and then sell into the panic when the boats arrive with only half the expected supplies? These are all hypotheticals, mind…A lot of money that comes in goes out…ultimately money matters because it gives you control.”

In his Acknowledgements, Mattich notes that his work of fiction hangs on a scaffolding of history. That history, he notes, is both well documented and well told in Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia and Laura Silber’s The Death of Yugoslavia. The sleepy river town of Vukovar was the site of an 87-day siege by the Yugoslav People’s Army that destroyed the town in the autumn of 1991. “It is estimated that the city suffered the most massive and sustained barrage fire in Europe since Stanlingrad.” That siege and its aftermath has since been labelled a massacre for the thousands of defending Croatian National Guard and civilians that were killed. Mattich loosely quotes the opening lines of Dante's Inferno and rarely has it seemed so apt.

The horrors of history are therefore addressed in Mattich’s fiction, lest we forget. Mattich is able to draw our attention to the beauty and terror of the place and time with a lightly-told, thought-provoking, and informative tale of spies-on-spies. I can’t recommend it more highly. Each book in this series is a real treat, but this last was his best. I didn’t want it to end.

This series is published by House of Anansi Press in Canada. This book and the others in the series will be available in the United States in paper this summer and I urge those interested in international fiction to order them early and often.
#1: Zagreb Cowboy
#2: Killing Pilgrim

An interview with Alen Mattich


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