I think this book is incredible – incredibly bad. Everybody loves this book, and this astounds me. I absolutely hate it. The writing is jumbled, full of nasty depictions and often indecipherable. It is a mixture of history, biography and fiction. (But my opinion changes by the time I reach the end of the book, so please read on!)Here is a chapter that plays with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand:The horses are trotting stolidly and the coach is bobbing steadily, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s eyelids are listlessly sliding down his corneas. The weighty eyelids are about to reach the bottom, but then the horse on the left raises its tail - embarrassingly similar to the tussock on the Archduke’s resplendent helmet – and the Archduke can see the horse’s anus slowly opening, like a camera aperture……The left horse is dropping turds like dark, deflated tennis balls. (page 89)This is to be found at the beginning of the story entitled the “Accordion”. I don’t find this enjoyable to read. One such description I can take, but repeatedly, over and over, this I find disgusting. I am sure you recognize that the author is playing with the facts, since the Archduke was assassinated traveling in a car. The writing is considered “experimental”. I can do without such experiments.In a story called “Islands”, a child is speaking:I went down the stairs and announced my thirst. Aunt Lyudmila walked over to the dark corner on my right-hand side - suddenly the light was ablaze – and there was a concrete box with a large wooden lid. She took off the lid and grabbed a tin cup and shoved her arm into the square. I went to the water tank (for that’s what it really was) and peeked over. I saw a white slug on the opposite wall. I could not tell whether it was moving upward or it was just frozen by our sudden presence. The dew on its back twinkled, and it looked like a severed tongue. I glanced at Aunt Lyudmila, but she didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She offered me the cup, but I shook my head and refused to drink the water which, besides, seemed turbid. So they brought me a slice of cold watermelon and I drowsily masticated it . (page 8-9)So tell me, does a nine year old speak with these words: masticated, turbid, “announced my thirst”? Every paragraph, if not every sentence is gruesome. And for what purpose? Just to be “experimental”? As I mentioned above the writing is jumpy and confusing. What is the point with all this depiction of horrid situations? Why? I see no important message being imparted. Well, everyone else seems to understand, but I do not. I do not enjoy, do not see the point or the important message that is being imparted. So why am I splashing around in this muck?And then I came to the story, “Blind Jozef & Dead Souls”. This is longer than the others. It could be classified as a novella. This is about an émigré, a young man who has left Bosnia. He has gone to the States and he remains there while the war rages in his home country. He reads of the Siege of Sarajevo of what is happening there tohis kin and childhood friends. It is about his emotions, how it feels being separated from home, how it feels in a strange culture, where nothing makes sense, how it is to be a foreigner in a strange land. It is also about how he sees life in the US. It is about where he belongs. Of course his views on life in America are absurdly true and comical at the same time. This is wonderful writing. It shows how it feels to be a refugee. It is amusing and poignant and sad all at the same time. You are still aware that this is the same author of the shorter stories. The reader does recognize the author’s unique style.I am glad I read the book to the end. I would have to conclude that the author has a distinctive style and in at least one of the stories I empathized, laughed and learned how life as a refuge might feel. I am going to give the book three stars, because I liked that one longer story. Just a word of warning: don’t expect a smooth comfortable read. Please keep in mind that I don’t even like comforting reads….. I prefer to be grabbed, aroused, upset, moved by the books I read. Such books in fact comfort me by their ability to distract me!
As a Bosnian who now lives in the States and writes in English, Aleksandar Hemon has been compared to Nabokov, Conrad, Kundera and even Hrabal. While these comparisons are, certainly, flattering, it is obvious that they are made simply because these are the cultural references the reviewers or the blurbers associate with the part of the world Hemon comes from. This is a rather pathetic situation that occurs over and over with writers from other parts of the world, especially when their “exoticism” goes beyond Western Europe or Latin America. It seems that in order to place them, American reviewers can only use the token touristy data they have about the writer’s so-called “background,” relegating the writer’s makeup to ethnic picturesqueness. What makes a writer is less the accident of his birth than the books he’s read. From the very first line of “Islands,” the story opening The Question of Bruno, I was struck by its Proustian echoes: something in the sentences’ rhythm, a melancholy or a hard-to-define longing for a lost world, in spite of its bloody history. My intuition was confirmed 200 pages later by the beginning of the last story, “Imitation of Life”: “For a long time I used to go to bed early”—the exact words that open Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. But Hemon continues, “but then my parents finally bought their first TV set.” This sentence, with its reference to one of the most nostalgic moments in the history of literature (Marcel’s remembrance of the paradise lost of his childhood when his mother used to kiss him good night) is emblematic of Hemon’s tightrope walk between romantic nostalgia and literary parody. The tone and atmosphere change in the second story, “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders,” whose irony and dark humor bordering on the absurd represent what one could call an Eastern European sensibility. The story is written in small paragraphs of two to three lines, such as “Alphonse Kauders said: ‘Literature has nothing human in itself. Nor in myself.’” Reading Hemon one can understand that this dark humor and this awareness of the absurd often manifested in a dismantling of language are not gratuitous but are rooted in Eastern Europe’s blood-soaked history. The more insane its history, the more permeated with dark humor it is. One can find this humor in Mikhail Bulgakov’s or Daniil Kharms’s musings on their daily life under the Bolsheviks, as well as in many other writers virtually unknown in this country, who at the turn of the 20th century were writing a literature that was more Kafkaesque than Kafka. The third in a collection of eight stories, “The Sorge Spy Ring,” is centered on Sorge, a spy the narrator has read about as a child in The Greatest Spies of World War Two. This book may have existed, and Aleksandar Hemon the author (not to be confused with Hemon the character) may have read it; what is certain is that “The Sorge Spy Ring” mixes “real” events with fiction, and uses photos as complementary artifacts for storytelling, as in the books of German writer W.G. Sebald. It also uses footnotes as a sort of parallel story or as a corollary. The text above the footnote describes the “real life” of the Yugoslav little boy fantasizing about Sorge’s adventures and about the possibility that his own father might be a spy, while the text in the footnote is Sorge’s story as described by the “objective,” impersonal voice of the author. A literal representation of day-life versus nightlife or the underground, one might say. “Reality” and fiction are thus two parallel universes that converge when fiction catches up with reality, and the boy’s father is thrown in prison for political reasons.“Blind Josef Pronek and Dead Souls” (a story whose main character is also the main character in most of the pieces collected and published two years after The Question of Bruno under the title Nowhere Man, with the subtitle “The Pronek Fantasies”) offers a Balzacian solution to Hemon’s two main characters, Pronek and Hemon, by allowing them to cross paths and meet, and thus uniting two separate universes into one encompassing world.
What do You think about The Question Of Bruno (2001)?
After reading the much more recent story collection, Love & Obstacles, I went back to Hemon's first book, from 2000. Disappointing. Formal experiment and "fresh," politically significant subject matter, along with many finely crafted sentences and surprising images, couldn't for me, overcome the lack of story arc and general flabbiness from which many of the pieces suffer. The novella, "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls"--strangely not identified as a novella on the cover copy of the edition I read--was a case in point. An exploration of the life an accidental immigrant, like Hemon, stranded in the U.S. when war engulfs his native Bosnia, it suffers, too, from a mocking narrator who seems somehow interested in distancing itself from the failures and humiliations of its title character. Weird. Maybe it was just too soon for Hemon to turn this material into fiction. The immaturity of the voice sours many of the stories in the book, which is rather long for a standalone collection, and at times feels even longer. Aside from two stories -- "Coin" and "Exchange of Pleasant Words"--it did not reward.
—Marian
Again, another talented writer who can cash in for life on the strength of his background - presenting Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian Ukranian (but descended from the semi-mythical Alexandre Hemon - Breton is a popular surname in Brittany, as you will learn.) I like Hemon's writing. The stories I've read in The New Yorker (some of which are included in this collection, in longer form) I prefer to this collection overall, which has its strengths and weaknesses...much of Hemon's work is semi or mostly autobiographical, or autobiographical in that po-mo tongue in cheek way, but Hemon can get away with it. Also interesting is the very well-established and publicized fact that Hemon began writing in English in 1995, a mere 3 or 4 years after his arrival in the U.S. So I took especial interest in noting his choice of words; there are some fetish words, like "hirsute" which you'll almost never find with other writers. Sometimes Hemon tries a little too hard to be Nabokov ("we will submit another image" to the reader, etc.) but really, I'm not complaining.
—Clare
The one thing I have most appreciated about Hemon’s writing is his uncanny ability to somehow twist English words and phrases into a way which shows he doesn’t quite grasp English the way a native speak would, yet has a mastery of the language that far exceeds my own. For those who are not familiar with Hemon’s story, let me quickly say that Hemon had only a basic understanding of English when war stranded him in the United States at the age of 27. Within eight years, Hemon had written his first book in English, The Question of Bruno, a collection of short stories. This collection shows a fluency that my own writing lacks. Hemon’s writing is breathtaking.Being a collection of Hemon’s earliest writings in English, I expected The Question of Bruno to parade some of Hemon’s most absurdly enjoyable turns of phrase. There is a cadence in what I’ve read of Hemon that is beautiful and unusual, a device that perhaps only a native-native speaker could use so effectively. Yet, I missed that in this collection. Perhaps I’m way too lazy or I’ve grown too familiar with Hemon’s style of writing and didn’t notice, or maybe early editors were quick to point out the “flaws” of Hemon’s English (“You can’t do that!”) Whatever the reason, The Question of Bruno didn’t resonate the same way with me. That’s not to say the collection isn’t stellar and certainly well-written—it is—but it lacks a certain musicality that I greatly anticipated.Of the Hemon I’ve read so far, I will say each book has it stellar moments and traits, but that none have quite come together for a book that knocks me off my feet. The thing is, however, I believe Hemon has the ability to do it. Either I have yet to read that book, or he hasn’t written it quite yet. It’s in there though. And one day, hopefully soon, Hemon’s going to whip out an award winner that will catch the attention of the people.
—Chris Blocker
