Book review: 'The Book of My Lives'

Book: The Book of My Lives
Author: Aleksandar Hemon
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 224
Price: Rs 1435

There is an odd sensation, common to anyone settling in America, of all this strangeness being terribly familiar: the vast cars, the black power lines looping from wooden post to wooden post, those fire hydrants, the lawnmowers that need a driver. It’s a street you know well. It’s the street from television.

When Aleksandar Hemon landed in Chicago in 1992, he came fattened on the requisite diet of Americana, from Coppola to Kerouac. But after arriving the images on the screen performed a terrifying inversion: on his television, the city he knew intimately was being brutally estranged. Hemon watched as Sarajevo slid into chaos. “I attempted to identify the people on the screen — writhing in a puddle of rose-red blood, their legs torn off, their faces distorted with shock — but I couldn’t,” Hemon writes.

A collection of autobiographical pieces, The Book Of My Lives is the fifth book from an author who left Bosnia as a radical young journalist for a one-month American on an exchange scheme a matter of days before the longest siege in the history of modern warfare descended on his home city.

He learnt literary English by reading another eloquent refugee, going through Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with a dictionary. In this way Hemon turned the bad cards dealt him by history into a winning hand: his English is unencumbered by the weight of tired, automatic associations and has the capacity to refresh the referential relation between things and the words we use to describe them. There is crispness to Hemon’s sentences.

Hemon’s book deals with displacement. He oscillates between the austerity of building a new life in alien America and getting nostalgically drunk on the cultural cocktail of prelapsarian Sarajevo. In Chicago he pounds the streets, a “low-wage, immigrant flaneur” on a quest for a sense of belonging, heartened by American generosity and bemused by American condescension (“It is so neat to be from other cultures”).

In writing of Sarajevo, he tries to “comprehend how everything I had known came violently apart”. In one story he recalls how his inspirational literature lecturer ended up becoming a close associate of Radovan Karadzic, the “talentless poet” turned effective war criminal.
Hemon ends up trying to unread all that this lecturer taught him.

Perhaps it is because so many of these essays are about fragmentation that Hemon has decided to leave them in discontinuous relation to each other. Still, the way these essays are collected is frustrating. All but one of them have been published somewhere else and they have not been reworked with enough care. The tone fluctuates from essay to essay and frequently, you are told something as if for the first time having read it only a few pages previously.

The final story in the collection, ‘The Aquarium’, is Hemon’s account of the death of his nine-month-old daughter after she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Sentence by unsentimental sentence, Hemon recounts what happened with controlled fury. All you can do is hang your head in your hands and wait for it to pass, conscious that Hemon, the impotent author, the grieving father, is denied that luxury.