Crossing
Pajtim Statovci, Trans. by David Hackston
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Crossing
Pajtim Statovci, Trans. by David Hackston
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... packs a devastating punch: it is the work of an accomplished novelist. 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.
... timely.
Statovci’s refusal of the satisfactions of character is central to the book’s larger concerns. 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.
Despite its modest length, Crossing is nothing less than the tale of human existence: of how we construct ourselves, how that changes as we try to fit ourselves to the changing world around us, and the price we pay... a tale of desperation and survival.
... images not only figure Bujar’s interest in old-fashioned storytelling, but collide the messy worlds of human and non-human, value and waste, old and new. On a close scale, the concordant linkage of discordant ideas that figurative language performs shadows Statovci’s wider focus on the always-uneasy movement between worlds and identities.
... part of what makes Crossing unpredictable is how swiftly horror replaces laughter.
This intense and captivating book.
...sad and searching.
... beguiling.
...disorienting but affecting.