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The award-winning author on the truth about life as a migrant, the problem with reality TV shows, and other Finnish writers we should be reading
Pajtim Statovci, born in 1990, is a Finnish-Kosovan novelist who moved from Kosovo to Finland with his family when he was two years old. His first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the prestigious Helsingin Sanomat literature prize for the best Finnish debut. In 2016 he won the Toisinkoinen literature prize, awarded for second novels, with Crossing, the story of two teenage boys trying to leave post-communist Albania. In a review in the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell compared its main character, a pathological liar who exploits assumptions about victimhood, to “another queer criminal, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley”. In 2018 Statovci won the Helsinki writer of the year award. Crossing is out in paperback next month.
Your first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia, featured a racist, homophobic talking cat. Why did you turn away from magic realism in Crossing?There’s something very liberating about magic realism. It doesn’t care about rules. But operating inside the universe of a magic realist novel can be hard for both writer and reader: it’s so easy to get lost in the pool of metaphors. In Crossing I wanted to tell a more rational story. In this book there’s a fair amount of fear, violence, desperation and unfulfilment, which stems from a sense of not belonging, and shame. Continue reading...