The noble truths of suffering

07/01/2009 10:00 PM

By MELISSA ALBERT
Contributing Reporter

No Comments - Add Your Comment


Courtesy Velibor BožoviC Aleksandar Hemon



Book review
Most of the stories in Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, Love and Obstacles, take place in Chicago and Bosnia, but they’re less dependent on the specifics of place than most immigrant fiction. The real terrain Hemon pursues is that of shared memory and the few remaining corners of a well-examined life.

Linked pieces jumping around in chronological time tell the story of an unnamed Bosnian immigrant, a writer who, like Hemon, traveled to the United States just before the outbreak of war in 1992. Unable to return to his country, he’s forced to build a permanent life in Chicago, where Hemon himself now lives and works.

The narrator sells magazines door to door to hone his English; he writes unsellable poetry; he remembers his youth as the son of a diplomat. His experiences in the United States play out against a backdrop of TV broadcasts showing the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and casual brutality is ever-present in the stories. “American Commando” recalls the narrator’s childhood obsession with American-style tough guys, fed on the “steady diet of sex and violence” afforded by ratings-free Socialist cinemas. He recalls the war he and friends waged against a group of local workers one summer, recounting the tale in the present to a Bosnian documentarian. The documentarian, however, has experienced real war — she was unable to leave Bosnia until after the fighting began, and her family, unlike the narrator’s, is dead.

“Szmura’s Room” imagines the experience of Bogdan, another Bosnian who lived through war before coming to Chicago. He lives in the extra room of a nearly insane landlord whose aggressive countertop notes approach poetry in their terse weirdness: “The door is either/Open or locked/I like/Locked.” The story ends in a sudden, unresolved act of extreme violence.

The narrator speaks of his younger self, as seen in “Stairway to Heaven” and “Everything,” with the same assessing distance he reserves for his family, particularly his father. The man is painted as an eccentric seeker of truth — in its most quotidian form — and “The Bees, Part One,” named after the raw manuscript he shows to his son, reveals his surprisingly childlike understanding of that goal. It also shows Hemon’s clear-eyed humor, which renders even potential slapstick in deadly serious fashion.

The collection’s best story is its last, “The Noble Truths of Suffering.” In it the narrator, back in Bosnia for a literary function, brings a visiting American writer to his parents’ home for lunch. Months after the embarrassing meal, in which the narrator’s father presses the writer to validate his son, and his mother heaps the man’s plate with food he doesn’t want, the narrator recognizes his parents in a scene from the writer’s newest book. The theft of his life for another man’s fiction is one more violating act in a book heavy with the meaty physicality of displacement and survival.


No Comments - Add Your Comment