Life, Interrupted

The critic James Wood, in reviewing Aleksandar Hemon’s earlier novel The Lazarus Project (2008), wrote of the Bosnian author, and his resettlement in America in the wake of the Balkan wars, that Hemon’s writing sometimes reminds him of Nabokov’s. (Hemon has said that he learned English by reading Nabokov and underlining the words he didn’t recognize.)

Yet the feat of his reinvention exceeds the Russian’s. Nabokov grew up reading English and was educated at Cambridge. When his American career began, in 1940, he was almost middle-aged, and had long experience in at least three languages.

Hemon, by contrast, tore through his development in the new language with hyperthyroidal speed and has, without question, mastered the English language–indeed, has taught himself such control over it, and achieved such virtuosity in it, that his colleagues in fiction, raised with all the advantages of being native speakers, should feel both uneasy and ashamed at the effortless, balletic achievements of his books.

Hemon’s work demonstrates that a prose rich enough and strange enough to do justice to the perils of art and the bizarre, mysterious, humiliating, and liberating exigencies of life can, indeed, exist in contemporary English, freed of the dragging infelicities exhibited by our more self-consciously “lyrical” writers, brought into being through steely, surgical control, an unstrained, unstinting sense for the absurd, and the application of an utterly remorseless–but utterly fair–eye.

That this unflinching gaze was born out of the author’s experience as a refugee from the war in Bosnia, during which he found himself stateless and adrift in America, seems almost self-evident. This severing echoes and colors all of Hemon’s work: His protagonists and characters are touched by it directly and indirectly.

The Lazarus Project detailed the search for moral meaning undertaken by the Chicagoan and Bosnian expat Vladimir Brik, who becomes fascinated by the case of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant shot (for murky reasons) by the Chicago police in 1908. The Lazarus Project was widely acclaimed, a finalist for the National Book Award.

Love and Obstacles, a new collection of short stories, may well suffer from the success of The Lazarus Project. Hemon began his career with a collection of stories, and one fears that Love and Obstracles may call forth one of book reviewing’s most hideous phrases: a return to form. The author’s reputation, with The Lazarus Project, seemed to be poised on the brink of some great and unspecified enlargement. (Despite his having been awarded a MacArthur grant in 2004, his name has not yet achieved the slightly boring ubiquity that goes with real, broad-range, thunderous success in America.) And few things bore literary journalists more than writers–especially foreign writers–failing to act in accordance with some imaginary social heterodoxy.

Happily, whatever its ultimate critical reception, Love and Obstacles will stand on its own considerable merits.

Comprising eight stories, it returns again and again to the theme of life dislocated, routine interrupted, existences cut off from their cultural and political roots with varying degrees of severity. These violations of order can be simple, comically banal–a mission to buy a black market deep-freeze, the initiating action of Hemon’s story “Everything.” They can be as complex and crushing as a violent ethnic war, as in the case of “The Conductor.”

The personal, psychological losses incurred Hemon sees as irremediable; death has crept into everything. A traumatized young Serb dies a bizarre semi-accidental death at the end of the nightmarishly funny “Szmura’s Room,” set in a Chicago exhaling the same spirit-crushing vulgarity that infected Nabokov’s Berlin. In the final story, “The Four Noble Truths of Suffering,” a banal conversation overheard by a visiting American author at the narrator’s dinner table finds its way into his horrifying new novel, a tale of crazed former soldiers and child rapists. Even the freezer purchased by the wretched narrator of “Everything” becomes a white emblem of death, a coffin:

But Aleksandar Hemon’s books are not mere lamentations for innocence and cities ravaged. As terrible as it may sound, these breakages introduce into the lives of Hemon’s characters a perverse freedom. The freedom in the case of the adolescent narrator of “Everything” to reimagine himself as an irresistible Byronic lover (although Hemon has severe and lyrically executed humiliations in store for him); the freedom of a young Bosnian living with his parents–low-ranking diplomats in Kinshasa–to explore sex and drugs with the help of another terminally lost migr in “Stairway to Heaven.”

The comparison to Nabokov is certainly apt, though it is focused on Hemon’s powerful prose. But it is true in another connection as well: Hemon, like Nabokov, has mined the miserable and bizarre experience of exile, the sense of helplessness and insignificance it inculcates, with the same virtuosic ability, and come to a philosophical conclusion not entirely dissimilar. Hemon’s exiles, like Nabokov’s, undergo strange and humiliating torments, but in doing so they enter the extremes of the human condition, aware, aesthetically awake, free. (Though Hemon is never so obvious or disingenuous as to make dreary explicit statements about the soul-enriching properties of pain.)

We see this, perhaps, most clearly in “The Conductor,” the most wrenching and horrifying story, where the narrator, an aspiring Bosnian poet, lives in the minor hell of literary jealousy, attending salons at which the renowned Muslim poet Mohammed D. holds court. Hemon’s narrator pretends, out of sheer passive-aggression, to be an orchestra conductor after Mohammed wrongly introduces him as such one evening. The aspiring poet obtains a grant and leaves just before the start of war; Mohammed D. stays, still writing, and they lose contact for years, meeting again in Iowa City, where Mohammed has been brought for a conference, and once more in Madison, Wisconsin, where Mohammed has set up a permanent residence.

The older poet is by now a hopeless drunk and wife-beater, albeit still a writer of talents far beyond those our narrator possesses. The story ends with an allusion to Flaubert’s The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller: The narrator and Mohammed embracing in a freezing bed, the narrator holding him until his fear and rage abate enough for the drunken old man to sleep:

The sick man, a leper in Flaubert’s story, is of course an incarnation of Christ, and he redeems the guilty St. Julian from his grievous sins. Hemon’s Mohammed has no divine roots, and he offers no salvation. Only an image of the wreck of a culture, and alongside it, the faintest suggestion that, despite his cruel, recent death, Mohammed’s art will live in spite of the mire and evil of the world.

A faint hope. A similar hope can be detected in Nabokov’s brightest books, the sort of hope with which we must content ourselves when we survey the last century’s long register of catastrophe.

Sam Munson is a writer in New York.