Bolla begins in April 1995 in Pristina, Kosovo, where Arsim, a closeted Albanian literature student in a loveless marriage, meets Miloš, a Serbian medical student, in a café. Before the day is out, everything has changed. Their unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of the Balkan wars, which sends Arsim into exile and Miloš to the front, where he is broken beyond repair. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison, Arsim attempts to find Miloš again. Woven through their alternating narratives is a recreated legend of the bolla, a demonic serpent from Albanian folklore, a creature that each year is given one day of freedom before being swallowed back into darkness.
My Review
I have read a lot of books about war. Nothing prepared me for reading about a war that happened to my own people, one I witnessed. This was one of the hardest books I have read this year, not because of the violence, though there is violence, but because of what it does to people on the inside, in places that don’t show.
Bolla is set before and after the Kosovo War and follows two men, an Albanian and a Serb, who fall into a secret and devastating love affair in 1995 Pristina. They are supposed to be enemies by ethnicity. They are certainly enemies to themselves, as gay men in a society where that is not survivable. The war tears them apart in different ways: Arsim flees into exile, builds a sham marriage, and slowly becomes someone who punishes the people closest to him for a pain he cannot name. Miloš stays, goes to the front, and comes back in pieces. His chapters are short and hallucinatory, the prose fragmenting along with his mind. Arsim’s are a darker, steadier confession that implicates the reader in every ugly decision he makes.
Statovci does something I have rarely encountered: he writes about the shame and self-loathing that live beneath the surface of the gay experience with a ferocity and precision that had me in tears. Arsim is not a sympathetic character by the end, and that is the point. He is a victim who becomes a perpetrator, which is not a neat trajectory, and the novel refuses to explain it away or redeem it cheaply. The book does not judge. It simply shows, and lets you sit with what you see.
Running through the novel is the myth of the bolla, a demonic serpent that opens its eyes only once a year and devours whoever it sees. Arsim writes a story within the story of a bolla that befriends a blind girl. It is a small, fragile thing in an otherwise devastating book, and it functions as the one place where hope and imagination survive. That Statovci makes it work without sentiment is the measure of how good he is.