The Book of My Lives
December 2013
Aleksandar Hemon / Picador
For ardent admirers of Aleksandar Hemon’s well-crafted fiction, this non-fiction collection might come as a surprise. Familiar elements are present: the Bosnian migrant’s inner landscape and sense of displacement, the author’s uncanny ability to punctuate the mundane with the terrible blow of real experience and his distinctive bold humour. The language, however, is much more a departure; as if Hemon’s usual lushness of prose would detract from the duty to bear witness that drives these essays, which together loosely form a memoir of sorts.
Self-parody runs thick through this peripatetic journey of interiority and exteriority, from his four-year-old self coming to terms with the arrival of his baby sister, ‘I had knowledge, I had ideas, I knew who I was… Therefore, I tried to exterminate her as soon as an opportunity presented itself’ to his adult writer ‘complicated’ self. But it is his particular blend of insight, cynicism, compassion and aversion to trite conclusions that elevates his writing, from commentary on the hell of ethnic warfare, odes to Sarajevo and borscht, to the final shattering piece.
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