Found, and Lost, in America.

by Stephen Amidon Friday, Jun. 19, 2009

In The Noble Truths of Suffering, the best of the eight fine stories that make up Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection, a young Bosnian writer, visiting his homeland after years of exile in the United States, finds himself unexpectedly invited to a party in honour of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist named Macalister. Before attending, the Bosnian dips into the older writer’s work and discovers a passage he particularly admires: “One of these days the thick chitin of the world will break open, and shit and sorrow will pour out and drown us all. Nothing we say can stop that.” He is especially struck by the use of the word “chitin,” which (I discovered) refers to the tough protective membrane over crustacean shells.  At the reception, held at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Sarajevo, the Bosnian gets drunk and attaches himself to Macalister, who turns out to be an aloof but agreeable character, oddly willing to go wherever the wind takes him, which in this case turns out to be a bar laden with artifacts from the recent civil war, followed by lunch the next day with the Bosnian’s doting parents at their cramped apartment. Nothing, however, can bridge the American’s Zen-like detachment, no matter how hard the young writer tries. “I wanted him to be in awe of Sarajevo, of me, of what we meant in the world,” he confesses. “I wanted to break through to him, through his chitin.” And then, years later, the narrator buys Macalister’s new novel, a tough-minded war story that concludes with the hero visiting the parents of a buddy who was killed in Iraq. In it, the young Bosnian sees unmistakable echoes of that lunch in Sarajevo, including verbatim quotes and evocative portraits of his parents. Belatedly, he understands that he actually had broken through Macalister’s tough skin – just not in ways he intended. “ As he has proved in previous books such as Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, Hemon is a superbly original stylist ” Remarkable in itself, the story also catalogues Hemon’s virtues as a writer: his ability to straddle two distinct cultures, to twist stories in unexpected directions, to find startling uses for the English language. Born in Sarajevo in 1964, Hemon arrived in the United States in 1992 as a tourist, only to find himself stranded when Bosnia descended into chaos. He worked at a variety of odd jobs in Chicago while teaching himself the language of his adoptive country. The lessons proved a success; he is now considered one of the United States’better young authors, and in 2004 was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. Hemon’s experiences inform the stories in Love and Obstacles, all of which are narrated by men whose biographies bear strong resemblances to the author’s. In Szmura’s Room, he tells the story of Bogdan, a young Bosnian who washes up in Chicago, where he finds lodging with a Ukrainian-American small-time criminal who harbours dreams of becoming an FBI agent. In The Conductor, the young narrator, a Bosnian émigré writer who flees his nation’s civil war, describes his long relationship with a poet who remains in Sarajevo to chronicle the city’s violence and desolation. In Death of the American Commando, a Hemon-like writer is interviewed by a college film student about his childhood in Bosnia, while The Bees, Part 1 details a family’s attempt to keep its beekeeping tradition alive after undergoing a reluctant move from Bosnia to Canada. As he has proved in previous books such as Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, Hemon is a superbly original stylist. As with Conrad and, at times, Nabokov, his late arrival to the English language seems to have endowed him with an ability to conjure surprisingly beautiful phrases. The darkness of an African night is “uncarvable,” a wayward boy is described as having “shrimped up” when he absorbed the beating of an irate hotel clerk, a poet’s florid wife wears “eventful earrings.” An African market sells all manner of exotic meat, including “skinned mongrel creatures that seemed to have been slapped together in hell”; a working-class Chicago suburb is a place “where addresses had five-digit numbers, as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise.” This freshness of language helps Hemon achieve a deeper purpose: to explore the mechanics of cultural dislocation. In each story, an unhappy immigrant encounters a Conradian doppelganger who provides a mirror of his own tenuous status. This narrative strategy becomes explicit in Stairway to Heaven, when the teenaged son of a low-ranking Yugoslavian diplomat in Zaire, who is prone to carrying around his dog-eared copy of Heart of Darkness, falls under the spell of an American fabulist named Spinelli, an erratic type who claims to have connections to the world of espionage. “There might be a taint of death, a flavour of mortality, in lies,” the boy discovers, “but Spinelli’s were fun to listen to.” One can say the same thing for Hemon’s artfully wicked fables.

Stephen Amidon’s most recent novel, Security, was just published.