Book review by U.R. Bowie, originally posted on Amazon, 2010
Help
Wanted: New Narrator
I’ve read all of Aleksandar Hemon’s books. They have been
blurbed and reviewed by the most enthusiastic of blurbers and reviewers:
“dazzling, astonishingly creative prose” with “remarkable, haunting autobiographical
elements.” The latest Hemon offering, Love and Obstacles, is a series of
short stories, most of which continue in Hemon’s now familiar reminiscent
strain. They amount to a kind of Bildungsroman, the story of a guy from Sarajevo who comes to America —in a word, Hemon’s own
story, and therein lies the problem. Or, to put it more precisely, there may
have been no problem when he started writing in this nostalgic, reminiscent vein,
but by now the problem is obvious. What I’m writing about below is, primarily,
that problem.
IMAGERY
What seems to have most dazzled and astonished the blurbers
and reviewers of Hemon’s books is his ability to find unusual metaphors and
write with unique phrasing in his adopted language. Once again in Love and
Obstacles his sentences are often impressive. In the first story, “Stairway
to Heaven,” “the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness
outside was spacious and uncarvable.” In later stories a freezer smells of
“clean subzero death,” (58), a “cataractous moon” hangs in the sky (36), the
poet Dedo exudes “a rotten-fruit smell, as if his flesh had fermented”
(78)—Hemon is good at describing smells, especially the most repellent of
smells.
Some pages have sunbursts of brilliant imagery; on p. 69-70,
e.g., there is the boy rolling the body of someone shot by a sniper up a hill,
and the rock of Sisyphus is recalled. There is the surgeon, “putting together
his wife’s face after it has been blown apart by shrapnel, a piece of her cheek
missing, the exact spot where he liked to plant his good-night kiss.” There is
a foreign conductor hanging “on a rope like a deft spider, over his orchestra
playing the Eroica in a burnt-out building.” And then there is the man making
his way through sniper fire, he who suddenly stops to tie his shoe, and the
snipers, respecting that mundane need, cease firing. These scenes come,
ostensibly, from the poems of Muhamed D. (Dedo), and so are, in a sense, not
Hemon’s at all. But it’s oddly moving, the way that some of his best, most powerful
imagery is connected to the war in the former Yugoslavia ,
the one that he missed when he came to the U.S.
Hemon has a good eye for detail. Take the alcoholic (and
apparently homosexual) priest in “Good Living,” who sits drinking scotch, with
“potato-chip crumbles” on his “potbelly ledge” (89). Sometimes the author tries
too hard to achieve creative effects. What, exactly, is the “cataractous
moon,”mentioned above—is it a moon with cataracts? On p. 179 we have “the
stairs squeaked with untroddenness.” In the first place, the final word is
impossibly clumsy, and, in the second place, if the stairs are not trodden
upon, then how can they squeak? On p. 188, there appears “a tattered cat that
looked like a leprechaun dog.” Like a what? It’s difficult to figure
out, as well, in what sense darkness can be “uncarvable.” Worst of all are the
throbbing phalluses (35, 108). This image, which recalls the clichés of
pornography, always makes me laugh.
The story “Everything,” like the others, describes the tribulations
of the “I” narrator, who is still just an adolescent here. He is fleeing from
his family and yearning to return to it simultaneously. Even in the final
story, “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” in which the narrator is already grown,
living in America, having already established a reputation as a writer and having
begun publishing in “The New Yorker,” he still seems to be running from his
family, while somehow yearning to run back. As most of the stories, this one
ends on a sad note: the war begins, the electricity goes off, and all the meat
in the new freezer rots. In the final story, by the way, the writer Macalister
says (about everything) that he knows nothing about anything:
“There was nothing to know, nothing
on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it,
whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace
with that fact.”
“This?” I
asked. “What is this?”
“This.
Everything.” (194)
THE
NARRATOR’S MALAISE, THE SOLIPSISM
Almost all of the stories in this collection end on a
discordant note. In “Stairway to Heaven” the narrator’s family (the same family
that is portrayed in most of the other stories) is living in Africa ,
apparently doing not badly. The narrator, who is going through the throes of
adolescence, has some unpleasant encounters with a sleazy American, but, on the
whole, we have here a family much like any other. It is something of a shock,
therefore, when, at the end of the story, the family members are described as
laughing artificially, while “hiding desperately our rope burns” (36). It seems
to me that the “rope burns” are to come only later for this family, when the
war displaces them.
The “I” narrator, like most of Hemon’s first person
narrators in so much of what he has written, is angry, dissatisfied with the
world and with his place in it. An exception is the story “Good Living,” where
we find a rare note of contentment. The narrator has been selling magazine
subscriptions in Chicago ,
door to door, and he happens upon a priest who not only subscribes, but lends
his prestige to the salesman’s efforts (so that many others in the neighborhood
also take subscriptions). The story ends, “I could live here forever. This is a
good place for me” (93). It reminds me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes one “happy” day in a
concentration camp.
Why is the narrator so angry? Because things are eating at
him: (1) the war in the former Yugoslavia has deprived him of his country, left
him an emigrant (2) he is guilty at
having come to America and opted out of the suffering in Sarajevo during the
war (3) although he has become a successful writer in his new country, he is
consistently insecure and jealous of other writers. The issue of solipsism and
the perils of first person narration, both central to this collection as a
whole, first appears obvious in the story called “The Conductor.” The main
character is the Bosnian poet Muhamed D. (nicknamed Dedo), and you would
expect, therefore, that the title would be “Muhamed, a.k.a. Dedo” or something
like that. But the narrator wants everything to center around himself: “I
bought the anthology to see where I would fit into the pleaid of Bosnian poets”
(61). For the title of the story, naturally, he uses his own (nick) name. After
all, the whole collection is about “me, me, me,” and by the time we have read
all of the stories, we realize that this presents a serious problem.
You wonder why the book is called “Love and Obstacles.”
Twice the narrator mentions that he has written a poem by that name (58, 62),
and towards the end of the collection, in “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” he
mentions his fictitious “New Yorker” story with the same title (187). We never
get a look at either the poem or the story, but I believe that the title “Love
and Obstacles,” seen in the light of the prominent issues of the collection,
suggests the narrator’s deep frustration. He is wrapped up in himself, too much
in love with himself (actually he’s in “love-hate”), and there are just too
many obstacles to his ever feeling loved enough (by others) to be contented.
THE
MOTIF OF THE ROOTLESS EMIGRANT AND THE GUILT
Most of what Aleksandar Hemon has written revolves around
the issue of emigration and guilt:
“My story
is boring: I was not in Sarajevo
when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction
of my home town on TV” (68).
There you
have it in a nutshell. The story about Dedo (“The Conductor”) demonstrates how
the life of our narrator might have been different, if he, like the redoubtable
drunken poet Dedo, had stayed in his country, weathered the war, and written
powerful works based on that hideous wartime experience. But he didn’t, so he
cannot get over envying writers like Dedo, and feeling guilty and inferior to
such people. He travels America, giving readings of his stories, “fretting all
along that an enraged reader would stand up and expose me as a fraud, as
someone who had no talent—and therefore no right to talk about the suffering of
others” (71). It is remarkable how consistently laden with self-accusation and
self-hatred are Hemon’s first person narratives, not only in the present
collection, but in much else that he has written. Sometimes the anger and
frustration in the stories is tempered by humor (he has a good sense of humor),
as in the scenes where the narrator and Dedo drink to excess and return to face
the wrath of the Amazonian American woman whom Dedo has married (81-83). At
other times the humor cannot cope with the squalor and despondency depicted, as
in “Szmura’s Room.”
In this collection it is not only the narrator who emigrates
from Sarajevo .
It is his whole family. He goes to the U.S. ,
his sister to New Zealand ,
and his parents to Canada .
The “theme of the DP” is especially prominent in “The Bees, Part I,” which
describes the narrator’s father, his lovable eccentricities, and his attempt to
cope with a new life in Canada .
The problem for the emigrant (any emigrant) lies in his taking with him to a
new country his whole past experience. In his mind he recalls, largely, only
the good things about his abandoned homeland, while dwelling, largely, on what
is bad about his adopted country. Hemon’s narrators rail against the U.S. in many of
his stories, not only in this book. The main problem with America (for him) is that it has nothing in
common with Bosnia .
Everything in the culture new and different infuriates him, even the American
institution of football, with those big morons banging heads (see p. 80). At
least in this collection Hemon spares us our beloved baseball. I recall once
meeting a touring Russian soccer team in the U.S. , and listening to their coach
speak, with utter contempt, about the game of American football, which, of
course, he had never played, and about which he knew next to nothing. But our
ignorance never stands in the way of our hasty and vehement judgments of things
that are alien to us.
While the narrator fulminates against the cultural wasteland
that America is (and yes,
friends, you have to admit that American “culture” has its drawbacks), his
father, newly arrived in Canada ,
is castigating that country. His sister (“Sestra”—we never learn her name) is
not depicted railing against her new country of New Zealand, but maybe this is
only because the sister is a shadowy figure in all the stories, and is never
given much to say.
The saddest thing about the plight of the émigré is not,
however, his failure to adjust to his new homeland. It is the irrevocable loss
of his original homeland. He doesn’t like the new place, but when he returns to
the old place it is no longer there either. It’s like the Czech professor of
German whom I once knew. He no longer had a native language, since he had lived
in the U.S.
and forgotten how to speak Czech, but his English and German was heavily
accented. He, like Hemon’s narrator, was a kind of “nowhere man.” The tragedy
of being homeless is especially well described in the collection’s final story,
“The Noble Truths of Suffering.” Set in Sarajevo ,
it describes the family back in the very same apartment where they lived before
the war. They are back, but the city has changed, and it is no longer entirely
congenial to them. They are back home, but homeless.
BOREDOM
AND THE EGO-DRIVEN NARRATOR
In reading many of the stories in this collection, I keep
asking myself why they bore me. The answer, I think, is that the writer
sometimes makes the issue of boredom a leitmotif. He admits to considering his
fiction boring (“My story is boring” 68), and in one tale (the worst in this
collection), “American Commando,” the action centers around boredom. We have
the self-possessed narrator going on and on, enthralled with his recollections
of the war games he and his childhood friends used to play. He is describing
those games to a Bosnian woman who is filming him, who is, obviously bored,
while simultaneously the reader (at least this reader) is also falling asleep
in front of the pages of the book. The irony, of course, is that here is a guy
who skipped out on the real war, but in looking back on his past, he finds his
own childish obsessions much more interesting than anything real. It’s a daring
tack to take, writing a story about boredom. Why? Because if you write a boring
story you bore your readers.
The literary problem of the egotistical “I” narrator finds
its ultimate expression in “American Commando.” It’s as if the whole collection
were intended as a lesson to Hemon himself: “You’ve exhausted the mode of the
reminiscent in your stories, you’ve spent too much time lending the narration
to an alter ego, dwelling upon the “I” and its tribulations. It’s beginning to
get boring. It’s high time to write something in the third person.” Who
is delivering that message to Hemon? Hemon’s first person narrator, his alter
ego, who is just another version of Hemon.
We sometimes see a story straining to be told by an
omniscient narrator. “Szmura’s Room” starts out in the third person; the whole
thing (Bogdan’s sad tale) could easily be told by an omniscient narrator. What
we get, instead, is a strange sort of disguised narration. It’s as if the “I”
narrator, the same person who tells the other stories, feels embarrassed to
relate this one in the first person. Why? Because the story describes his
arrival in the U.S.
and his hapless existence as a boarder with a tyrannical and disgusting guy
named Szmura.
There are many hints that “Bogdan” is really a fictional
double of the narrator. E.g., “He reminded me so much of myself, as I had been
not so long before”(106). Rather than admit to his ignominious existence with
Szmura, the narrator passes himself off as far superior to Bogdan, condescends
to him as do all the other characters. Many of the scenes describing Bogdan
could simply not have been observed by the narrator who relates them, and it’s
a stretch to assume that all of his information comes from Szmura, who could
not possibly be privy to it.
Bogdan is the narrator, disguised by the narrator, and if he
is not, then we have in this story a textbook example of problems with “point
of view.” Take the scene depicting Bogdan’s visit to the Museum of Ukrainian Culture
“American Commando,” which could be titled “The Tale of a
Solipsist,” is boring, and the narrator’s “chewing gum” pronunciation of
American English is silly, and the narrator is well aware that it’s all boring
and silly, as is the author Hemon. But the author and narrator let the tale of
the playing children go on and on, presumably, to illustrate a point: “this is
what I must get away from in subsequent works of fiction. I must excise the
dreary self-possession from my works.”
NEW
DIRECTIONS?
It would be more than depressing, had the collection Love
and Obstacles ended with “American Commando,” but lo and behold, with the
final story, “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” it is beginning to look as if the
narrator and Hemon had finally heeded the message shouted loudly at them by “American
Commando” and by other stories in the reminiscent vein.
Here the same “I” narrator is telling the tale. Now he is
older and somewhat wiser, having been through a divorce and breakdown. His
parents appear again in this story as well, but here their function in not just
to provide fodder for nostalgic recollections of the past. The story is set in Sarajevo , where both the
narrator and his parents are visiting, living in their old apartment. As
mentioned above, they have come home to a place that is not the same place
anymore—they are eternal émigrés now, and they live in a museum: “this home was
the museum of our lives, and it was no Louvre” (203).
The narrator finds time even in Sarajevo
to throw a few lightning bolts in America ’s direction (182). Typical
is this remark: “I had had enough of America and Americans to last me
for another lousy lifetime.” In almost everything he has written Hemon’s
American characters have been portrayed as drooling dolts obsessed with
cheeseburgers, so it is a revelation to find the writer Macalister in this
story, a character both sympathetic and interesting.
“The Noble Truths of Suffering” stands on its own as a work
of fiction, but there are little touches linking it to the other stories in the
collection. The narrator’s teenage love Azra, e.g., shows up again, and he does
not even recognize this woman, although he remarks, “for all I knew, I could
have had a hopeless crush on her in high school”(185). A theme linking this
story to the others is the narrator’s feelings of inferiority and jealousy in
regard to other writers, and there are typically Hemonian lyrical, nostalgic
evocations of Sarajevo .
One of these features a description of the snow falling, “each flake coming
down patiently, as if abseiling down an obscure silky thread” (186). None of my
dictionaries are up to defining the word “abseiling.” Apparently it is too old
or too new for them.
The leitmotif of “suffering” runs throughout the stories.
Who has suffered and who has not? Are there moral degrees of suffering, so that
those who have suffered the most can feel superior to those who have not? What
“noble truths” does suffering teach us (if any)? Hemon and his narrators, of
course, feel guilty for not having suffered through the war. In “Good Living” the
priest asks the narrator if he has lost any loved ones in the strife, and the
narrator, in pursuit of magazine sales, lies. The priest calls to his
companion, “Come here and see someone who is really suffering” (90), but by the
end of the story you realize that this priest, who has never been anywhere near
a war and has not lost his country, is a suffering character himself—much more
deeply immured in sorrow than the narrator.
Suffering from feelings of guilt and inadequacy, Hemon’s
narrator (here as in the other stories) is mad at the world; he envies,
especially, those who are placid. Macalister, the writer who has been through
it all (alcoholism, divorce, war), is, in the narrator’s conception, the kind
of man he would like to be, one who has suffered but has now found peace, who
can look at a thing “as though it didn’t matter, because he would always be
safe inside himself” (192).
“The Noble Truths of Suffering” is a story about writing
fiction, describing how bits and pieces of detail, picked up by a writer in his
daily comings and goings, coalesce in a writer’s subconscious, to create new
worlds. Macalister visits the narrator and his family in their Sarajevo apartment, dines with them. There
are souvenirs of their time in Africa in the apartment, there is a TV on,
playing out scenes from the carnage in Baghdad ,
of American soldiers engaged in warfare (199). In the years subsequent to this
one encounter with Macalister, the envious and ever insecure narrator begins
reading his works obsessively, searching in Macalister’s fiction for evidence
of himself and his family, “hoping to detect traces of us in his writing, as
though that would confirm our evanescent presence in the world” (206). It’s as
if people who have little ontological identity can become more real, can take
on flesh and blood by becoming characters in a fiction.
In Macalister’s latest novel The Noble Truths of Suffering
the narrator finally finds the traces he has been looking for. The theme of Macalister’s
book is wartime Iraq and the
consequences (for American soldiers) of fighting in that war, and it is even
possible that the scenes on the TV in Sarajevo
provided the first dim creative impulses for the novel. Macalister’s creative
subconscious may also have sensed the tragedy of the displaced person, of which
that humble Bosnian apartment reeks, for when his imagination has finished
marinating the diffuse details that it collected at the dinner table in
Sarajevo, it puts them to use in a scene describing an even greater family
tragedy: the loss of a child in war.
Tiny, the Marine hero of Macalister’s novel drives drunk
through a snowstorm to visit the elderly parents of his dead comrade Declan.
The parents “are ancient and tired, tanned with deep grief” (109). The narrator
recognizes the parents as pale refractions of his own, sees in a multitude of
details how Macalister has transformed a scene from Sarajevo
(with parents and living son) into a scene in Michigan (with parents and dead son).
Declan’s parents listen to the gory details of Tiny’s story, about a gang rape
and murder in Iraq, with absolute placidity, because “there is nothing except
grief” left for them since their son’s death (210).
On the last page of the book the narrator finds himself face
to face (in a work of fiction) with genuine suffering and grief. The tragedy of
losing one’s whole previous life and becoming a DP is tragedy enough, but this
other grief, the grief that takes away all hope, is much worse. So much for the
leitmotif of “suffering.” The final few paragraphs are cited directly from The
Noble Truths of Suffering (Macalister’s novel), a fictitious novel by a
fictitious American writer. Hemon demonstrates, near the conclusion, that it is
really he (and his ego-driven narrator) who have made up the Macalister story.
He inserts his own description of the “abseiling snowflakes,” something that
Macalister could not have invented.
So here we have, at last, an outstanding story, the only
story in the whole collection that glitters with creative artistic insight. It
is not a string of vignettes stuck together, as are so many of Hemon’s stories.
It is a real short story, with a beginning, middle and end. The narrator here
describes a fictitious novel that he very well could write himself. The scenes from
that novel (outlined here) are powerful. Maybe he even intends to write such a
novel, a novel about the war in Iraq ,
a third person narrative describing characters who, finally, are not him.
What comes next for Aleksandar Hemon, we hope, is precisely
such a novel, a work in which the hazards of the first person narration (the
egotism, the solipsism) are left behind—in a word, a new creative departure. If
anyone needs confirmation that he has written himself out in the first person
mode, try going back and reading the first story of his first collection, a
story called “Islands .” The story is simply
brilliant, full of wonderful evocations, in striking language, of the feelings
of a nine-year-old boy in Yugoslavia .
It has no beginning, middle or end to speak of, but it can do without the
traditional structure. Each of its minuscule chapters (“islands”) is awash in
wonderful imagery and metaphors. Most of the stories in this latest collection
cannot compare with “Islands ” in aesthetic
merit. It’s time to try something different now.
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