Book review | Pajtim Statovci is a star of Finnish literature, and the novel is the most powerful prose in ages

Novel

Pajtim Statovci: A cow gives birth at night. Big Dipper. 279 pp.

Crueltyviolence and humiliation have been Pajtim Statovci core of the three previous novels. There is also a strong belief in the dignity of the individual, so the spirit of reconciliation remains the most important thing, despite all the violence – especially affecting minorities.

We can get better if we start to understand each other.

After an atypical publication break of no less than five years for its author, sheer anger now comes to the fore. Anger. Why even try to tell anything about anything, when prejudices, stupidity and sadistic hurt, those most cherished treasures of the powerful masses, seem to always roar more violently.

And what kind of duty does a writer have to verbalize his own and his environment’s festering wounds into nuanced art, when wallowing in abysses doesn’t at least ease his own breathing.

Cruising through the knowledge of Finland and Kosovo as well as the present and the aftermath of the breakup war in Yugoslavia A cow gives birth at night is the most powerful prose ever. Precise, terrifying and yet elegant in its expression.

For Statovci, the beauty of the sentences is based on the fact that they do not shy away at all, as in particular In bo (2019) showed. Now the same applies even more strongly.

The novelty the central character is an internationally successful writer, who has a thorough separation from everyone since he was a little boy. That is, also from those who are called closest.

Especially about them. A caressing hand strikes. And worse.

He is a stranger both at home and at school, a stranger in both of his homelands.

The theme sounds familiar from Statovc’s previous productions. Similarly, the opening of the oppressive everyday life into the realms of fantasy. The main character, who breaks down time and time again, finds his spiritual support in the fantasy world: something he can rely on. Perhaps I will also lose the most important feeling, the feeling of being loved.

People, on the other hand, always put conditions on their love.

Yesthe main character hates the world he’s been thrust into. Why does it have to be destroyed by floods? There is no reasonable reason.

It’s not acceptable, but in a way you can still understand bullying, scolding, torture and killing when it takes place outside the walls of the home. That is, to society, culture, collision courses of nations.

The most difficult thing is to recognize, acknowledge and say out loud the distortions up close.

Desperate poverty driving action. Indifference and condescension.

Racism, homophobia, patriarchy… The symbols of our time would be enough to list.

“

Anger inevitably goes hand in hand with self-loathing.

The essential thing is that together, in the course of the growth story, they push the book into so many twists and turns of the still quite young man that he doesn’t think he knows himself from the picture, which eventually thirsts for death for a few of his own family:

“I try to be a good person, to be moderate and noble and generous, but it’s hard to do good and be good when you believe or actually know that the worst of everything, the worst of all, is me.”

Anger inevitably goes hand in hand with self-loathing. Falling into one also derails the other.

Could you a boy thrown into a bad seam as his birth gift to choose another path for himself?

At the end, the author character of the novel characterizes himself as “the night that goes around the globe”. He has given up hope and doesn’t know “what keeps me alive anymore, my anger or its absence, the desire to look towards or away, faith in the writing or its end”.

Teaching prose would provide answers. This is not what this odyssey of a cornered man does, which imprisons its details with ruthlessness.

A cow gives birth at night push the response to those it belongs to, its readers.

So take it and do so well.

Let it be notedso that the discussion about this early autumn event does not go completely in the wrong direction: it is worth noting how beautifully Pajtim Statovci thanks his own family in the afterword of the work.

Read more: Young men fall in love in Kosovo on the eve of the horrors of war: Pajtim Statovci’s fine novel asks what is left when a person’s dream comes true