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My Cat Yugoslavia
- Narrated by: Ben Allen
- Length: 9 hrs
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My Cat Yugoslavia
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Summary
In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a near stranger, and the match quickly turns sour.
Shortly thereafter, the country is torn apart by war and they flee to Finland, where her son Bekim grows up to become a social outcast, a foreigner, and a gay man in an unaccepting society. His only true companion is a boa constrictor that he lets roam around his apartment.
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What listeners say about My Cat Yugoslavia
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lila
- 09-05-21
amazing
amazing affective turn novel, a story I had never come across before. Both gripping and influentional.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ian Larsen
- 25-09-19
Smart, gripping and sad
I thought this was a very good novel, with a lot of great narrative flourishes. it evokes a lot from the Kosovan and Finnish settings and gives a very powerful sense of the refugee experience through generations.
Ben Allen has a great whack at the dual narrator structure, a really good listen.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Alcidae
- 23-07-23
Sad, quirky story of refugee's disconnection
This is a refugee story, about the lives within a family and interspersed with the dynamics of the 1st-person protagonist's magic/ surreal relationships with a cat-human, and with his pet snake. The Yugoslavian writer is depressed, feels somewhat disconnected with his new adopted country of Finland. He has attachment issues and is prone to self-hate. He is also quite frustrating as he oftens behaves badly, sometimes towards the animals. The cat-human character, seemingly representing the self-hate he internalised from his father and homophobic Yugoslavian cultural heritage just felt like he'd never spent time with a feline. While I can empathise with the negative feeling, especially at his age, I am older and was bored by the miserable tone and found it not especially rewarding. I like complexity and original writing, however his disconnection from the world makes it a bit flat for me.
The reader may make the book work for others, but I found his separate falsetto and gruff tone for the protagonist's parents got very grating.
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