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A review by jdscott50
The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
5.0
The alienation that comes from immigration dominates Aleksander Hemon’s short story memoir. In a single act, you not only enter a foreign landscape, a new world, you are also immediately alienated from your homeland. Roberto Bolano said it best, “To be exiled is not to disappear, but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self.”
Aleksander Hemon’s collective non-fiction writing is turned into memoir. In it, he details how it feels to orient to a new life. He talks about how his family dealt with the culture shock of immigrating to Canada and his own immigration to the U.S. His small Sarajevo was easily navigated as opposed to the large Chicago, but he finds a way to break the city down into smaller pieces, his own neighborhood.
Hemon goes to Chicago as a writer in residence days before war breaks out in Bosnia. He has to watch as his homeland is made unidentifiable. There is even an instance where he is assigned to study photos of wreckage to determine what was there before. He also discusses the cultural reasons for the war and how desperate the situation was before war finally broke out.
It’s the last story that best sums up his situation, though not in obvious ways. His daughter is born with complications that require surgery after surgery. It begins to dominate their lives, becoming surreal. Yet he observes how different things are to everyone else. They are going about their lives, not in constant crisis, not worrying about what is going on with his daughter, never knowing the despair of the crisis. It’s like being in an aquarium. The events are only important to him and no one else. Hemon is brilliant in how he can connect this alienation in his writing. It’s an alienation with which anyone can identify.
Favorite parts:
...not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory. p. 166
Aleksander Hemon’s collective non-fiction writing is turned into memoir. In it, he details how it feels to orient to a new life. He talks about how his family dealt with the culture shock of immigrating to Canada and his own immigration to the U.S. His small Sarajevo was easily navigated as opposed to the large Chicago, but he finds a way to break the city down into smaller pieces, his own neighborhood.
Hemon goes to Chicago as a writer in residence days before war breaks out in Bosnia. He has to watch as his homeland is made unidentifiable. There is even an instance where he is assigned to study photos of wreckage to determine what was there before. He also discusses the cultural reasons for the war and how desperate the situation was before war finally broke out.
It’s the last story that best sums up his situation, though not in obvious ways. His daughter is born with complications that require surgery after surgery. It begins to dominate their lives, becoming surreal. Yet he observes how different things are to everyone else. They are going about their lives, not in constant crisis, not worrying about what is going on with his daughter, never knowing the despair of the crisis. It’s like being in an aquarium. The events are only important to him and no one else. Hemon is brilliant in how he can connect this alienation in his writing. It’s an alienation with which anyone can identify.
Favorite parts:
...not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory. p. 166