Aleksandar Hemon is half-Serbian, half-Ukrainian, and this
collection of eight linked stories are set in both the author's
native Sarajevo and in his adopted Chicago. Now settled and married
to an American, he has no ethnic allegiances and simply regrets the
destruction of his birthplace. He arrived in America seven years
ago knowing almost no English, which makes the achievement of these
stories all the more startling. As one might expect from an emigre
from such a grim moment in history, Hemon's stories are woven
around the terrors of war and exile. The horrific 'A Coin', about a
female news editor traumatized by the details of violent death, is
perhaps the most harrowing example. However, the stories also
contain many moments of wry humour - like the fate of the immigrant
sandwich-maker in the autobiographical novella 'Blind Josef Pronek
and Dead Souls', who dares to mistake iceberg lettuce for romaine
and then compounds the felony by imagining the error
inconsequential. Set against the remembered images of bodies
mangled by gunfire and minds poisoned by horror, such trivia of
civilian life seem both shockingly trivial and indescribably
precious. Although Hemon's influences, from Nabokov and Joyce to
Salinger and Carver, are discernible in every story in the
collection, there's already a strong and vigorously individual
voice developing, compassionate and with a wide emotional range.
The smart money is on Hemon as a future giant of American, and
Balkan literature, literature. (Kirkus UK)
This collection of stories about love, war, espionage and beekeeping is an elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia, and a journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation.
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