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