But Crossing is equally ruthless in its critique of the heroic individualism. Bujar consistently rejects collective identities, from the classification of refugees as 'barbaric' to the liberal championing of minorities. Statovci’s critique of identity politics takes a heavily satirical hand. longing and rage compressed in a single sentence at once sweepingly plangent and rooted in granular detail. But a more helpful antecedent may be another queer criminal: Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. I thought of Genet often as I read Statovci’s novel Bujar, in his voluptuous lying and his disruption of others’ lives, rivals any of Genet’s outlaws. Crossing, in its rejection of fixed notions of identity, has a kind of kinship with recent books by other young queer writers, among them Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, with its joyfully shape-shifting hero/ine, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which features a protagonist who moves between genders, inhabited by the spirits of West African myth. Statovci’s refusal of the satisfactions of character is central to the book’s larger concerns. It speaks to the sins of the fathers, which the children must transcend by crossing to the other side – or perish. It is a powerful phoenix of a book that rises from the ashes of the previous century. The brutal beauty of Crossing comes from its almost cellular understanding of belonging and exclusion, love and cruelty. finds new ways of bringing the question of who belongs, and who is cast out, to an exquisitely painful point. Statovci’s brilliance is primarily as an intuitive storyteller, though there is the occasional overdose of narcissistic misery. The sensitivity and poetry of David Hackston’s translation match the original.

With considerable literary panache, Statovci treads a line between raw tragedy and a more formal aesthetic of abjection bordering on existential horror, in the best European literary-philosophical tradition from Camus to Kafka, Kadare to Kristeva. The book is alive with such wonderful gothic scenes, a visceral sense of alienation and desire. The book expands and complicates Statovci’s central theme of youthful revolt-against conventional belonging, pre-determined identities, nationalities, families, origins, against life as a tyranny foretold. packs a devastating punch: it is the work of an accomplished novelist.

Crossing pajtim statovci review