by Nicole Yurcaba
Writing this review has been a weeks-long process, and I’m not ashamed to admit that even before I sat down to write this, I had to perform a cleansing ritual of sorts: walk three laps around the school where I work; listen to Apocalyptica; buy two tickets to an Apocalyptica show in Baltimore; take a deep breath. In previous weeks, whenever I thought I was FINALLY ready to sit and write a review of Pajtim Statovci’s Bolla, I found that I was not. Why? Well, Bolla is the novel that was meant to enter my life weeks before I realized how prophetic and applicable it would become to life-changing circumstances about to unfold in my personal life. Now, nearly one month after losing someone who brought so much hope, light, and stability to my life I realize Bolla is a novel that will stay with me for, well, probably forever.
Bolla is the story of Arsim, an Albanian and a recently married student in Kosovo. In a land hostile to Albanians, Arsim meets Milos, a Serb, who changes Arsim’s life in almost a single instant. Arsim’s life changes even more dramatically when within a couple weeks of meeting Milso Arsim’s wife announces her first pregnancy. After that revelation, Arsim begins a secret life, including an unlikely affair with Milos–a beautiful love story derailed by a war. When Arsim’s family flees abroad, Milos spirals down a dark path. Years later, after a stint in prison Arsim finds himself–alone, desperate, and hopeless–deported to Kosovo. Arsim attempts to begin anew, and unable to escape his past, embarks on a journey to find Milos and live life as best as he can. Gorgeously and delicately entwined with Arsim’s story and Milos’s dark, cryptic journal entries is the legend of the demonic serpent–the final prosaic layer which eloquently shapes a story of passionate love, displacement, and destruction.
While the novel adeptly highlights the consequences of war on civilian populations, Bolla’s power, however, lies in Statovci’s passionate, melancholic portrayal of Arsim and Milos’s love affair. Arsim’s professions about his relationship with Milos are heart-wrenching, especially as he describes never having “felt as good or as safe as when I am with him” and the fear “that I might lose him after such a short time together.” It’s the fear with which anyone who has found someone who possesses the intensity and ability to change one’s life for the better lives. At these points, Arsim becomes even more sensitive and human–characteristics which ultimately endear him to readers and make them empathetic to him and Milos.
Arsim also proves himself to be quite the philosopher, a man who observes and thinks deeply about those surrounding him. As he navigates the emotional and physical demands of his relationship with his wife and his relationship with Milos, Arsim makes keen, philosophical insights. He notes the world harbors “two kinds of people” and that this is ultimately “unfair,” because the world consists of people who “don’t need to fear anything and people who ought to fear everything.” He also notes, “That’s how fear works: it arrives all at once, and it is indivisible.” Arsim’s observations, at other points, are painfully misanthropic: “At times like that I truly believe that reality follows the lies we tell ourselves.” These misanthropic pronouncements make Arsim less endearing. Well, except, perhaps, to those of us who share the same sentiments (forgive me–it’s been a difficult summer).
Of course, one can’t read Bolla without investing in Milos’s chaotic diary entries, which are just as integral to the novel as Arsim’s narratives. In the diary entries, readers find an emotionally torn person, one who makes similar misanthropic observations about life as Arsim. One of Milos’s most memorable entries states, “Loneliness peels you out of your skin, cuts your tongue, and abandons you in a stale, locked room to slowly evaporate.” Readers encounter an emotionally harrowed person. Such entries comment about the human condition and a human’s ultimate need for others. Simultaneously, the entries echo Arsim’s dissociative tendencies: “It’s easy to despise this life and everything about it because none of it is mine.”
And, it is such statements that, in hindsight, made Bolla the novel that came into my life at a time when I didn’t realize I would need it most. Two weeks after finishing Bolla, I began enduring one of the most despairing periods I have ever endured. As I faced the brutal reality of having someone swiftly ripped from my daily routine, as I dealt with the overwhelming sense of loss and watched a bright personal and professional future filled with support, affection, and adventure evaporate, I carried many of Arsim’s sentiments with me. Just as Arsim expressed that he more and more felt like an outsider in life rather than a participant, I found myself returning to passages from Bolla because they echoed my personal situation. One of the most resonant passages I discovered in Bolla appears as Arsim begins traveling a dangerous path into the realm of online dating and a fateful sexual meeting that lands him in prison. In this moment, Arsim states:
In the weeks before the trial, I keep back to a thought I first heard from my father
a long time ago. He once said it’s good to experience misery and distress, because
only misery and distress can prepare you for the day when misery and distress
return, because it always happens, he said; they always come back.
However, this preparatory note is a gentle reminder. As the person I lost often reminded me, “Life’s a process, and sometimes processes are not easy.” Sometimes, too, processes are cyclical. Just like life.
Sometimes the process is indescribably painful, and it includes a brutally slow step called “waiting.” Bolla offers readers plenty of insights about this imperative step in the process. However, Arsim reminds readers that, ultimately, they are the catalyst to that step in the process. He acknowledges, “I realize I’ve spent my entire life waiting.” He recognizes, “Then there are those who don’t wait but who act, those who ask and shall then receive, those who know what waiting is.” He promises, “I will not wait another moment, I repeat to myself, I put my foot on the gas and refuse to be afraid. I will take it, I tell myself out loud, I will take it, once and for all I will take back what was taken from me.” It’s a fantastic piece of motivational advice, one that as I cycle through grief’s many complex individual stages, I’m carrying with me. Why? Well, because the Bolla would positively change my ability to withstand a crisis and strive towards the one stage of grief that is most often difficult to reach–acceptance.
Bolla is the novel readers will be afraid to love. At first, I was, because, quite frankly, Arsim’s actions after his separation from Milos are not only desperate, they are questionable and discomforting. He is an unlikeable character who strives to redeem himself. More significantly, he grows, and he recognizes that attempting to return to a single moment, or set of experiences, from the past is often the worst decision one can make. Through Arsim’s mistakes and transformation, readers learn a vital message – no matter what, one must keep moving forward.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
