I am reading a collection of stories, “Love and Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon, a very special writer. Hemon was born in Sarajevo in former Yugoslavia and was already a Bosnian writer when he found himself in the United States in 1992, just prior to the outbreak of war in Sarajevo, his beloved native city. There he learnt English as an adult, much like Nabakov and Conrad, and began writing fiction in English that was good enough to be published steadily in the prestigious New Yorker magazine.Hemon’s fourth and latest work, “Love and Obstacles”, published in 2009, is a collection of interlinked short stories that feature both his Bosnian past as well as the dislocation experienced by the exiled Bosnian community in North America. In this way, his stories straddle two different worlds and capture an astonishing range of circumstances – cultural, political and emotional. There are stories here that hark back to Hemon’s Ukranian ancestors, transplanted earlier in the last century in rural Bosnia. 'The Bees, Part I' describes the narrator’s father’s efforts at pursuing the family vocation of beekeeping even as their world grows more steadily volatile and dangerous with the disintegration of Yugoslavia. 'Everything' chronicles the bizarre social environment and corruption prevailing in the socialist era of his childhood as seen through the eyes of an oversexed teenage boy. Hemon’s stories are marked by self-irony and cultural pride, as well as the anguish and dislocation of exile in an alien – and alienating – environment. Comparisons to Nabakov and Conrad are inevitable, but Hemon remains a true child of his age, seduced like his contemporaries everywhere else, by the strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in an eponymous story. When I picked up this book, I had forgotten it was a collection of short stories. However, the narrator in each story is the same and I actually read it more like a novel. Wonderful writing - funny, poignant, sad. Though perhaps not an example of the writing throughout the book, my favorite line: "The color of the Scotch rhymed with the leaves outside." I was struck by the themes of real vs. unreal, the definition of identity, and what makes a good story to tell - and who should tell it. This is an immigrant story, but also a people story.
What do You think about Amore E Ostacoli (2008)?
I really enjoyed this collection. Recommended!
—moanzy
