Book Report: The Book of My Lives (76)

3. Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2014) (1/20/23)

Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964) is best known for his fiction, apparently, but what he does with reality is remarkable. Born and raised in Sarajevo, he became a political refugee in Chicago at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia, at the age of 27. This book tells stories both of his (as he might say, misspent) youth and of his resettlement in his new home.

The book consists of loosely connected essays, which cover such topics as his grandmother's borscht, his hapless chess career, his Irish setter Mek, life during wartime (many of the people he mentions are parenthetically described as "now on trial in The Hague"), a disastrous birthday party, and on and on. But more deeply, these essays are about identity, about home, about the interior vs. the exterior. Hemon is a keen observer: the details he presents, and the language he uses, are amazing. 

His is a somewhat detached (he might say, Slavic) sensibility; emotion is spared in favor of rational depiction. Accounts of his growing-up in Bosnia are wryly presented. He is self-described as wayward, not really knowing where he's headed, but he's curious and adventurous. He gets into humorous scrapes as a result, but he always emerges unscathed and perhaps a bit wiser. 

That wisdom permeates the book. Here he is contrasting his left-behind home of Sarajevo with his newly found home of Chicago:

Where the urban landscapes of Sarajevo had been populated with familiar faces, with shared and shareable experiences, the Chicago I was trying to comprehend was dark with the matter of pursued anonymity.
     In Sarajevo, you possessed a personal infrastructure: your kafana [café], your barber, your butcher; the streets where people recognized you, the space that identified you; the landmarks of your life (the spot where you fell playing soccer and broke your arm, the corner where you waited to meet the first of the many loves of your life, the bench where you kissed her first). Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for "privacy" in Bosnian), your fellow Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. The borders between interiority and exteriority were practically nonexistent. If you somehow vanished, your fellow citizens could have collectively reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip accrued over the years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city. Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together but for them to be safely apart. Size, power, and the need for privacy seemed to be the dominant dimensions of its architecture. Vast as it is, Chicago ignored the distinctions between freedom and isolation, between independence and selfishness, between privacy and loneliness. In this city, I had no human network within which to place myself; my Sarajevo, the city that had existed inside me and was still there, was subject to siege and destruction. My displacement was metaphysical to the precisely same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn't live nowhere; I wanted from Chicago what I'd got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.

In time, as later chapters describe, he does begin to find that "geography of the soul" in Chicago, as he outlines in a piece called "Reasons Why I Do Not Wish to Leave Chicago: An Incomplete, Random List." Here is point #1 (of 20), for example:

Driving west at sunset in the summer: blinded by the sun, you cannot see the cars ahead; the ugly warehouses and body shops are blazing orange. When the sun sets, everything becomes deeper: the brick facades acquire a bluish hue; there are charcoal smudges of darkness on the horizon. The sky and the city look endless. West is everywhere you look.

The final chapter hits a different note, however, as he describes the illness and eventual death of his 10-month-old daughter, Isabel. It is heart-rending, but not in a sloppy sentimental way. What makes it compelling is his utter presence, even in the midst of confusion and helplessness, and his willingness to put his experience into words. "I had a hard time talking to well-wishing people," he writes,

and an even harder time listening to them. They were kind and supportive, and Teri and I endured their babbling without begrudging it, as they simply didn't know what else to say. . . . One of the most common platitudes we heard was that "words failed." But words were not failing Teri and me at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. Teri and I had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. The words of Dr. Fangusaro and Dr. Lulla, always painfully pertinent, were not failing either. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. . . . If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn't want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn't want to know what we did; we didn't want to know it either.

I could go on quoting. I love Hemon's language and his insights, his sensibility and his eye for detail. It is astonishing that he did not begin writing in English until he was about thirty, launching his English-language career with "The Sorge Spy Ring," which was published in his debut collection, The Question of Bruno (2000).

I will be seeking out his fiction.