Bolla – Pajtim Statovci

Set in Kosovo during the Balkan Wars and their uneasy aftermath, “Bolla” is a taut, mournful novel about the irreconcilable distance between who we are and who the world allows us to be.

At its center is Arsim, an Albanian graduate student in Pristina in 1995, newly married and anxiously performing straight respectability when he meets Milos, a Serbian medical student. Their brief affair is driven more by urgency than tenderness — there’s no romance here, only raw hunger and the oppressive knowledge that it cannot last. When war erupts, their lives splinter: Arsim flees with his wife and young child, while Milos, abandoned, enlists and descends into mental and physical collapse.

Years later, Arsim returns to Kosovo — deported after a prison sentence involving a minor he met online — and begins retracing his past. What follows is a slow, fractured search for answers — about himself and about Milos — that culminates in a final reunion. It avoids cliché and instead offers something far more unsettling: the realization that some damage is permanent.

The novel alternates between Arsim’s first-person recollections and a hazier, possibly imagined narrative from Milos, told from inside an institution. These later sections drift between memory, dream and delusion, further destabilizing the novel’s sense of time and truth. It’s a technique reminiscent of “In Memoriam” or “Swimming in the Dark,” but Pajtim Statovci is less interested in catharsis than in decay: how a secret, once buried, festers.

The prose, deftly translated from Finnish by David Hackston, is spare but sharp. Statovci’s writing often feels like it’s holding its breath. There are echoes of the doomed lovers of “Giovanni’s Room” and “Maurice,” but “Bolla” resists their intimacy. It reads instead as an elegy – for lost lives, unrealized futures and the suffocating grip of shame. 

The novel is steeped in toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia, and while this can verge on thematic repetition, that exhaustion is part of the point. These men cannot imagine another future because the world has never allowed them one.

The mythical serpent from which the novel takes its title — the bolla, which sleeps all year and wakes once to devour what it sees — floats through the narrative as a symbol of both love and destruction. But the metaphor feels thin, underdeveloped and strangely disconnected from the novel’s emotional core.

If the novel has a central tension, it’s between internal and external violence: the war that consumes a country, and the quieter, more insidious war that shame wages on the self. Milos, in Arsim’s absence, is destroyed by the former; Arsim, by the latter. Both are, in different ways, unmoored.

Arsim is not a hero; he is often cruel, selfish and painfully aware of his own failings. His final act — rescuing Milos from an institution only to abandon him again days later — is devastating not because it is surprising, but because it is inevitable. Love, in “Bolla,” is not healing. It is another wound.

The audiobook is a great way to get through the darkness. Tyler Kent handles Arsim’s voice with careful detachment, while Michael Crouch, in the more fractured Milos sections, brings his signature ability to embody the disaffected and unraveling. Together, they sustain the novel’s melancholic tone, though Crouch, as always, is particularly haunting.

For readers of queer fiction, this will feel thematically familiar. What sets it apart is its setting: the war, the displacement, the political and personal disintegration of post-Yugoslav life. Still, the emotional terrain has been well-worn, and the novel sometimes struggles to escape the weight of its own bleakness.

“Bolla” isn’t a book you’ll want to live in for long. It offers no comfort, no catharsis, only the slow, painful truth that repression — personal or political — rarely leaves survivors. 

Rating (story): 4/5 stars

Rating (narration): 4/5 stars

Format: Audiobook (library loan)

Dates read: April 29 – April 30, 2025

Multi-tasking: Okay. This is a character-driven novel that shifts between timelines and narrators, and its overwhelming sadness can make it easy to disengage. I recommend taking it in small doses and pairing it with tasks that let you stay focused.