Bolla

Astounding writing distinguishes this portrait of love, loss, and war from Kosovo-born Finnish writer and National Book Award finalist Statovci (Crossing). The story alternates between the feverish recollections of Miloš and Arsim, whose paths cross briefly but indelibly in 1995 Kosovo, where Miloš, a Serb who is studying medicine, and Arsim, a married Albanian literature student, become lovers. Arsim recounts his disastrous marriage to Ajshe (she is "remarkably beautiful, silent as a drape") and his doomed affair with Miloš, comparing himself and Miloš to "two birds that have crashed into the window," and describes how mounting ethnic tensions forced him and his family to flee their home ("We Albanians are washed across the world like a handful of sand scattered into the sea," he reflects). In nonlinear passages extending to 2004, Miloš riffs on the horrors he encountered during the Balkan wars and reveals his deteriorating mental state. Woven throughout is the myth of the snake-like bolla, a daughter of God who is set free by the devil for a single day a year, conceived by Statovci as a metaphor for the men's brief but powerful liaison. Statovci sustains a deeply somber tone as the characters struggle to endure while looking back on a sad past of missed opportunity, "exhausted by that speck of freedom." It's an eloquent story of desire and displacement, a melancholy symphony in a heartbreaking minor key. Statovci is a master. (July)

Set primarily in the city of Pristina, Kosovo, this novel portrays the passionate love affair between Miloš, a Serb who is studying medicine, and Arsim, an Albanian literature student at the university who has just learned that his new wife is pregnant. With tensions between Serbs and Albanians escalating and homophobia rampant, they must keep their affair hidden. The narrative moves from 1995 to 2004, alternating between the two characters; Arsim and his family finally flee Kosovo and resettle as refugees in an unnamed city, while Miloš goes to the front to tend to the wounded when the Kosovo War breaks out. Suffering from PTSD, Arsim indulges in risky and abusive behavior and is deported without his family to Pristina, while Miloš's mental state deteriorates so markedly that he can no longer function. Interwoven throughout the novel is a version of the Albanian myth of the snake Bolla, the daughter of God, who is freed by the Devil once a year on Saint George's Day. VERDICT Winner of the Finlandia Prize, this novel by the Kosovo-born Finnish author Statovci (Crossing) vividly describes the devastating effects of war. A harrowing and breathtaking book about abandonment, cruelty, and desire.--Jacqueline Snider, Toronto

Two men fall for each other in the wrong place at the wrong time in this bleak tale of love and war. The third novel by the Kosovo-born Finnish novelist Statovci is structured around the alternating narratives of Arsim, a closeted gay man and aspiring Albanian writer, and Miloš, a medical student. Arsim is in emotional retreat twice over, entering a loveless marriage to hide his homosexuality and treading carefully in Pristina, Kosovo, where he's an "Albanian in a world run by Serbs." His furtive relationship with Miloš is exhilarating but short-lived: It's 1995, and the Bosnian War soon sends Miloš to the front and Arsim to exile in an unnamed city. As the story follows the two into the 21st century, each has suffered badly, and an attempt at reconnection only reveals the depth of the damage. Miloš' chapters are briefer and more impressionistic, suffused with horrific memories of war's carnage. ("I have held a friend's heart in the palm of my hand.") Arsim's chapters are more straightforward, but though his PTSD is less acute, he's still suffused with fear, repression, and anger. He is routinely abusive toward his wife, Ajshe, and their children and makes a series of poor decisions that further sabotage his well-being. Statovci lets little sunlight into the narrative, the better to emphasize just how powerful homophobia and self-loathing can be, and Arsim is deeply unlikable; "may the Devil eat you," Ajshe spits at him, and he deserves that world-class insult. But he comes undone in engrossing and complicated ways. Indeed, he's so well drawn that Miloš' portion of the narrative, however graceful, feels disproportionately thin. From either perspective, though, the mood is profoundly sorrowful. An unflinching consideration of the long aftereffects of an affair cut short. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Girl and It For almost a year it hasn't felt sunlight on its skin, only the cold walls of its cave, which it scratches and gnaws incessantly, nervous and restless, its claws and teeth ground and blunt; it cannot distinguish night from day, sleep from wake, its wings from the pitch darkness, or its calloused body from the stones and boulders with which from force of habit it exchanges pleasantries. They tell its story in grim tales that frighten little children. Finish your dinner, it loves leftovers, they say, it will think you are its friend, and while you are asleep it will steal in like a breeze through the window or rise up like steam through the floorboards, so slowly that you won't even notice, it will climb into your bed and quietly lie down next to you, then it will press its forked tongue in through your nostrils, your mouth, and your ears and out through your eyes, and with that you will die and won't live to see the following morning. Don't talk back to your parents, don't be selfish, vain, lazy, greedy, envious, don't lie, because it will appear and eat you alive, swallow you like a marshmallow. It lives in the judgments that the enraged hand down to one another, the words used to describe the stubborn and the agitated, the resentful and bitter, and it lurks on the paths we tread alone, where the rivers meet and the current is at its most treacherous, in abandoned houses, uninhabited forests and dales, on lonely mountains whose tall, icy summits pierce the clouds like balloons. For one day a year it is allowed out of its cave, always in the springtime, at sunrise, when the trees stand straight and the fields have begun to grow new hide. On that day it has a set of borrowed wings, and it is called a kulshedra, but on all other days it has a different name. It is said that while it is free it destroys everything it sees, that it strikes the woods ablaze, emptying the towns, razing everything the people have created in the preceding year. After this, it begins looking for somewhere suitable to nap; it visits the sea, the land, and the heavens, and after finding an agreeable place it sometimes forgets where it has come from, where it resided only a day earlier, how many people it has just killed, the guilty and the guiltless, and even sings in a voice hoarse with allure. # One year, as it rocked carefree on a branch, it felt a pebble strike its side. It boomed like thunder and disappeared from sight in the blink of an eye. "Who is there?" came a bright voice from the mouth of a girl wrapped in a bearskin standing at the foot of the tree. In a flash, it darted down from the sky and grabbed the girl, wrapped itself around her body, and held her face close to its own, ran its tongue across her eye sockets, which were as empty as the pockets of the dead. "Do you know what I am, you silly little girl?" it asked. "No," the girl replied and began to giggle. "I am blind." "That tickled me, by the way," she said and continued chuckling. "You are very strong," she said as it tightened its grip. "I wish I was too." "Aren't you afraid of me?" it asked. "Afraid?" "Yes." "Of course I'm not afraid of you," the girl replied, playfully tapped its hide, unable to appreciate its immensity, and laughed again. "And it's not very polite to call me silly when we don't yet know each other. I might be blind, but I'm very clever." "Really?" "Yesss!" All it could do was join her chuckling; it lowered the girl to the ground, and when it was about to leave, the girl reached out her left hand and grabbed it by the end of the tail. "Where do you think you're going?" "Away," it replied, wriggled free of the girl's grip, and twisted into an attacking position, its hide covered in gleaming scales and crinkles, its mouth like a loaded weapon, ready to bite the girl's arm off as punishment for her impudence. "Very well," she said. "But don't go just yet. Do you want to play with me first?" "Play?" "Yesss!" After giving this a moment's thought, it agreed to the girl's suggestion, and the two of them chased each other across the fields and meadows, taking turns hiding in the thickets and the boughs of trees, and as evening fell they were both exhausted and had told each other everything-- the girl about her family, who had thrown her out of their home, because what could they do with a blind child, and it had told her about the cave where it had lived its life and all the different names it had been given. The girl's name was Drita, which meant light, and it thought the name was amusing because the girl had never seen the light. Before saying goodbye, they agreed to meet again in a year's time, and from that moment on they met every year, always in the bloom of spring, in the same forest where they first encountered each other, on the same path where the girl almost lost her arm. # Over the years, it taught the girl to hunt, to stake out prey, and to throw a spear. It bit off one of the girl's breasts too, the better for her to shoot a bow and arrow, and proudly followed her development into an adult, a woman every bit as strong as a man. One spring, it plucked up the courage to ask, timid and bashful, if Drita would become its wife, if she could imagine them living together, spending time together every day of the year. Drita began to weep, and for a moment she was unable to answer, so overcome she was with emotion. And does it matter that I was once . . . a girl, too?" it asked. "No," Drita answered, catching her breath and raising her hands to its cheeks. "It doesn't matter at all," she continued and pressed her lips against its mouth, which was as rough as bark. "I will be your wife, of course I will. I have seen it now." "What have you seen?" it asked. "The light." And it is said that there they remain to this day, just the two of them, curtsied statuesque in front of each other, in a cave on the side of the mountain where night never retreats. Excerpted from Bolla: A Novel by Pajtim Statovci All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.