Michael’s Comments (group member since May 31, 2017)

Michael’s comments from the Nordic Book Club group.

A really interesting connection of the text with the narrator's possible connections--or broken connections--with Yugoslavia

Hi Erin. Thanks for your comments and questions.
I think the snake did help Bekim to work through some fears, but there is still a question about the result of that relationship. Didn't he ultimately kill the snake? That would be a kind of violent resolution I think. The snake had curled around him in bed, and was at that point a danger to his life whether in a physical sense or perhaps as a "jealous lover" who would crush his spirit. I'm not sure which it is, but I do think he could not go forward in his life if the boa began to dominate it.
Yes, there probably are parallels between his feelings about the cat and his attitudes toward Yugoslavia. When he returned to Yugoslavia he needed to visit his old town, but could not bring himself to make the kind of "homecoming" we usually associate with visiting a former home. He found and lost a cat. Love and loss continue to be factors in his life, as he both "finds" and "loses" men, searching for the way to find a love which he can embrace without a loss of the person he has become, a Finnish man who no longer need to abandon his roots or feel the need to escape them.

questions 3 and 4.
I think the snake is connected with Bekim's fears. He feared snakes, but needed to overcome that fear by first capturing the snake (in the bag), then throwing it at the merchant in the town he had lived in as a boy. In his Finnish life, he took care of the snake, again fighting fear through satisfying the snake's needs. But as the snake became more assertive ( a potential killer? a dangerous lover?) he attacked it, as he might have wished to do to his father.
The cat seems to represent a desire to offer love and to be loved, but there are certainly mixed results there. The cat Bekim finds does run off; the "cat" Bekim picks up in the bar is abusive, and ultimately must be ejected, though Bekim is in conflict about that relationship. I think there is just the one actual cat in Bekim' s narrative, though there is also one in Emine's.