![]() ![]() The one identity he declines to claim is his own: the name Bujar, the life of starvation, deprivation and tragedy in Albania he led and fled ten years ago with his close friend and sometime lover, Agim.Ĭrossing, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, is a book that looks with intensity at every aspect of identity, questioning every element of its ever-inventing narrator’s conception of self. He constantly seeks a city in which he can be comfortable, where he can be himself, though what he considers himself to be is sometimes in flux and ambiguous. The book opens after Bujar’s unsuccessful suicide attempt in Rome, travelling from place to place, restlessly pulling on and discarding identity after identity-in Germany claiming to be a woman from Bosnia, in New York claiming to be an actor who has acted in small-scale productions all across Europe, in Helsinki claiming to be an immigrant from Italy. ![]() In each new location 22-year-old Bujar claims a new heritage and a new history. In Crossing, Finnish-Kosovar novelist Pajtim Statovci’s second novel, a queer narrator starts over in every city-sometimes presenting as a man, sometimes as a woman. ![]()
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