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Overview
A love story about what it means to be an outsider from the most imaginative new voice in international fiction.
In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably—he is terrified of snakes—he lets roam his apartment. Then, during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love—which he will find in the most unexpected place.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525432456 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2018 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 260,333 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 15.70(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I proceeded with barely perceptible steps, as though I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. I’d been there once before but hadn’t dared venture farther than the entrance. But there they were for anyone who wanted them. You could buy them, just like that. Anyone could acquire one and do with it as he pleased. Nobody was asked to explain why he was buying one, or what for; was it a spur-of-the-moment decision or had he been thinking about the project for a while already?
Anyone could lie once he reached the desk: Yes, I’ve already got all the equipment. It’ll be coming to a good, loving home, a terrarium three feet by three feet by six feet. I’ve got everything it needs: a climbing tree, a water bowl, places to hide and plenty of wood chips, everything you can think of, mice too. I’ve been thinking about this for as long as I can remember.
I could feel their presence in the soles of my feet, which were tense and clenched. There’s no mistaking that sensation—the shudder that runs from the base of your spine and down your legs, that winds its way along your neck into the back of your head, the muscles as they tense until they are numb and unresponsive, the hairs on your skin as they stand on end as if to attack.
The woman behind the counter quickly appeared beside me. I was standing by the gerbil enclosure and looked in bewilderment—no, in admiration—at the creatures’ complex silhouettes and wondered how they got through life with their stumpy legs and long tails.
“Been thinking about a gerbil, have you?” she asked. “It’s a nice, low-maintenance pet, doesn’t need much looking after. You’ll have it easy.”
“No. A snake, actually,” I replied. “A large snake.” I watched her face and expected a different kind of reaction, surprise or astonishment, but she simply asked me to follow her.
We walked down into the basement, past freezers and shelves of dried food, past cages and specially designed toys, past glass cubes of terrarium animals, cockroaches, locusts, banana flies, and field crickets. The smell of death hung everywhere, hidden beneath the cold-warm aromas of wood and hay and metal.
They were kept in a darkened cellar space because the air was damper and the conditions imitated their natural habitat. The door wasn’t opened and closed all that often, and they weren’t on display. Many customers might have declined to go down there for fear of stumbling across one of them. Their mere shape was enough to drive many people into a panic.
The snake department was divided into two sections: poisonous snakes and constrictors. There were dozens of them, an entire storage unit full of them, stacked one on top of the other, the bulkiest and strongest on the lower shelves and the smaller ones on top. They came in all different colors: the lime-green tree pythons gleamed like bright neon lights; the thick yellow-striped Jamaican boas appeared before my eyes like the tastiest cake at a banquet; and the small orange corn snakes and brown-striped tiger boas had wrapped themselves into tight knots.
They were in glass terrariums, stripped of their might, wrapped round their climbing trees. Some of them had stretched out along the length of the terrarium, bathing their skin in the water bowl and digesting their food. They all shared a sense of profound melancholy. Their lazy heads turned slowly as though they were bored, almost humbled. It was sad. To think that they had never known anything else.
“These have been imported from a breeder abroad; you can’t catch these in the wild,” the woman began. “So you can handle them freely, but bear in mind that snakes generally enjoy being left to their own devices.”
An image of the place they had come from appeared in my mind, because I’d seen videos on the Internet of the factories in which they were bred. They looked like the back rooms at fast-food joints: full of tall shelving units, stacked tightly with black, lidded boxes where the snakes lived until they grew large enough to be sold. At the bottom of each box was a small layer of dust-free wood chips and a single branch. They had never seen daylight or felt the touch of the earth, and now they were put on display in spaces mimicking natural conditions. Do they ever learn that all lives are not equal?
###
I ordered one there and then. A boa constrictor.
The terrarium arrived first, and I assembled it myself. Its new resident was delivered to my apartment separately in a temporary box. Where do you want it? Yes, that’s what the driver asked. Where do you want it? As if it was of no significance whatsoever, as if the delivery box contained a flat-pack bookcase and not an almost fully grown boa constrictor. I asked him to leave it in the middle of the living room.
For a long time the snake remained silent and still. It hissed faintly and moved cautiously as I prized open the lid, letting in some light, and I caught a glimpse of its lazy, clammy body, the triangular black patterns along its brown skin, its noble movements. As it squeezed against itself, its dry skin rattled like a broken amplifier.
I’d imagined it would be somehow different, stronger, noisier, and bigger. But it seemed more afraid of me than I was of it.
I own you now, I said. Eventually I built up the courage to open the lid fully. And when I finally opened it, the snake began writhing so frantically that I couldn’t tell where the movement started and where it ended. Its forked tongue jabbed back and forth on both sides of its triangular head and it began to tremble as though it had been left out in the frost. Soon it poked its head out of the box, and its small black eyes flickered as though plagued by a relentless twitch.
Once it had slowly lowered its head to the floor, I lifted the box and tilted it, the quicker to get the snake out. It slumped to the floor like a length of play dough and froze on the spot.
It took a moment for the snake to start moving. It glided smoothly forward in calm, even waves. The motion seemed unreal, timid and slow but purposeful and vivacious all at once. It explored the table and sofa legs, raised its head to look at the plants on the windowsill, the wintry landscape opening up behind the window, the snow- covered trees, the brightly colored houses, and the undulating gray blanket of cloud across the sky.
Welcome home, I said and smiled at it. That’s right, welcome to your new home. When the snake withdrew beneath the table and coiled itself up, as though it was afraid of my voice, I felt almost ashamed of the place into which I had brought it. What if it didn’t feel at home here? What if it felt shackled, threatened, sad, and lonely? Would what I could offer it be enough? This pokey apartment, these cold floors, and a few pieces of furniture. It was a living creature for which I was now responsible, a creature that didn’t speak a language I could understand.
Then I began to approach it. I checked from the reflection in its small dark eyes many times that I was in its line of sight, before slowly sitting down on the sofa in front of it and waiting for it to come to me.
Reading Group Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of My Cat Yugoslavia, a remarkable, sometimes surreal, story about a mother and son, each struggling to find their place in an often hostile world.
1. What are your first impressions of Bekim and Emine, the two main characters in the novel? How does learning that they are mother and son change how you see them? In what ways do their lives mirror one another? In what ways are they very different?
2. Why do you think the author chose the title, My Cat Yugoslavia? Consider the roles of the several cats that appear in the novel, as well as how the dissolution of Yugoslavia impacts the characters. Consider also Bekim’s belief that “that a name can cause more bad than good” (p. 57). What role do names play in the novel?
3. Compare and contrast Bekim’s experiences as a gay man with Emine’s experiences as a woman, as an Albanian, as a Muslim, and as a first generation immigrant. How are they similar? How are they different? How do Bekim and Emine look at other people in similar positions?
4. When Emine was a child, her father used to say “There was no use wasting time daydreaming if you were too close to your own dreams, because there was a greater likelihood that those dreams would come true, and then you’d have to accept that making those dreams come true wasn’t quite everything you’d imagined. . . . A man should always strive for something he can never achieve” (p. 14). How do the dreams of the characters in the novel—for instance, Emine’s own fantasies of becoming famous or Bekim’s fantasies of a happy life with the cat—either support or undermine this idea? What are the consequences of dreaming?
5. My Cat Yugoslavia is a realistic novel, with the obvious exception of the talking cat Bekim meets. How does the inclusion of this character affect your reading experience? Why do you think the author chose to include this fantastical element? Have you read other novels that employ a similar technique?
6. Bekim hates being asked where he’s from, to such a degree that he sometimes gives a false name, just so people don’t suspect that he’s an immigrant. Why does he feel so strongly about this? What past experiences have influenced his thinking? How does being identified as an immigrant affect the way people view and treat him?
7. Why does Emine still marry Bajram, after he reveals his true colors? What about her circumstances and her character informs her decision? Why does she finally leave him, many years later?
8. How does moving to Finland change the different members of the family? How do they process their experiences? In what ways does it change how they see themselves and the world around them?
9. Customs and traditions are an important part of Emine’s life in Albania. What does the inclusion of these details in the novel show us about Albanian culture? Are other characters also governed by customs, traditions, or social forces?
10. How is homosexuality treated in the novel? Consider the ways in which the gay characters—Bekim, the cat, Sami, and others—address their sexuality. Consider also Bekim’s claim that “between me there are no questions. There’s no abuse, no reasoning” (5). Is this borne out by the relationships in the novel?
11. On page 48, Emine makes several generalizations about Albanian people, saying that “Albanians refused to feel any form of shame. They would rather flee from it, run to the ends of the earth, while at the same time dedicating their lives to showing they had nothing to be ashamed of in the first place” and that for an Albanian, “losing face was a fate many times worse than death.” In what ways do the Albanian characters in the novel conform to these generalizations? In what ways do they contradict them? In what ways do characters in the novel grapple with shame?
12. The talking cat hates immigrants and gay people, but he is often implicitly compared to both (consider Bekim’s observation on page 77 that “The cat couldn’t properly pronounce the English lyrics, though he thought of himself as a full-blooded citizen of the world”). What role does the cat play in the novel? How does he highlight the ways in which “outsiders” are treated? Is he a comic figure or a tragic one?
13. My Cat Yugoslavia is arguably just as much the story of the dissolution of Yugoslavia as it is the story of Emine and Bekim. Consider the ways in which historical events that happen off-page impact the lives of the characters in the novel both directly and indirectly. How does the death of Josip Broz Tito on the day of Emine and Bajram’s wedding affect them both? Why do you think the author uses sociopolitical events as the backdrop for his story?
14. Fear is an important (and often motivating) emotion for many characters throughout the book. Think about Bekim’s childhood fears of snakes and cats, and his decision to live with both animals as an adult. Think also about the fear he and his father share about flying. How do different characters’ fears manifest themselves? How do they respond to these fears? What do these fears reveal about them?
15. Evaluate Bajram’s belief that “we should come up with another word for evil and that name should be laziness” (p. 198). Does the novel support this belief? What do you think about this statement?
16. Consider Emine’s statement, “We were cut off from two different countries that nonetheless had come to resemble each other more and more, and we no longer belonged to either one” (p. 212). What do you think she means by this? In what ways have Albania and Finland come to resemble each other? Why does she not feel part of either one?
17. Bekim and Sami’s big fight comes when Sami asks Bekim, “Why do you torture yourself with shit like this?” (p. 228). Why does Bekim spend so much time reading and thinking about horrible things? What impact does it have on him? Why do you think he responds so negatively to Sami’s question? How does the argument change Bekim?
18. Snakes and cats are inextricably linked throughout the novel. Consider their roles both individually and in relation to one another. In particular, discuss Bekim’s visit to his grandfather’s house, where he arrives with both a stray cat and a viper he has captured. Think about what happens next and what it means in the context of the novel.
19. How does the last chapter of the novel, in which we learn that Bajram killed himself, and the extent of his mental illness, affect how you think about him as a character, and of the novel as a whole? Does it give you a sense of closure, or raise further questions? Do you feel like the novel ends on a positive note?
