Bostonist Books: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon (Review)

Twice, no one seems to care that the author understands someone's language. He often wishes he were back home. He repeatedly runs from danger—sometimes intoxicated, sometimes not. The "crushing sadness of hotel rooms" is affirmed again and again. He journals. He takes stabs at poetry. He reads reviews—though, hopefully, not this. He watches his father attempt to adhere to the truth. He sits down for an interview with a NYU student chronicling the "Bosnian experience" and highlights a period of "childhood war" for her.

Now to "The Noble Truths of Suffering." The basics are this: the nameless man meets a writer at a diplomatic function in Bosnia. They get drunk. The narrator shows the writer the city and invites him home to his parents for dinner. The writer takes him up on it, the narrator becomes embarrassed, and the writer—eventually—leaves. What makes it work for us is this: to us, the story is constructed as something akin to two well-balanced, parallel circles with a few interlocking lines, tilting in this direction and that, jumping away from lines and scenes with a "Spring in Fialta"-like precision, riveted with language fine-tuned to the point of visibly bristling on the page. The scope, balance, and juggle (where Hemon cuts the prose-meter of the line, when he cuts from scene to scene, and how the cuts and the tilt of the different lines move together) of the story are handled with near pitch-perfect consistency, coming across in total as some sort of sarcastic, hardscrabble Nabokov.

It's a shame that artists who possess a unique conception of rhythm seem to only occur in uniquely singular, personal instances. It seems like there's a space in criticism between, say, how Allen Ginsburg journaled to himself and wrote his poems in that "Ginsburgian idiom" and the language of a faceless, slightly larger, linked group—in this case, the Beats. The space between two levels of "Ginsburg rhythm" comes to mind mainly because (1) his letters are to this Bostonist's left, and (2) from letter to letter, one can discern the salient, seemingly pedestrian, but satisfyingly fascinating fact that Ginsburg addressed himself differently to different groups: clueless newspaper editors, his father, his lover, Kerouac, and others.

Hemon gets this: the flux, the looseness of language and rhythm. But Hemon's rhythm belongs very much to Hemon. While we may analogize to Nabokov, it's important to keep in mind that this is still about Hemon. Critics have been terrible in this context (see: Benjamin, Kafka, and the perpetually abused notion of the "Orient") and it doesn't do us much good to cite another author who was "good with language" without keeping a very, very bare-bones notion of individual rhythm in mind.

There's a certain sort of decisiveness in "The Noble Truths..." that places it in better light than The Lazarus Project, in our opinion. We still haven't made up our mind about how we feel about the arc that takes us from "Good Living" to "The Bees," but individually the stories work, and work well.

Finally, as highlighting is just as much an act of reading as anything else listed in the beginning of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, here is a quick sample of highlights we made throughout the work, things that made us laugh, or say, "Yes! Language!":

"I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue."

"...a junta of class bullies."

"...wizened peppers and sunken papayas..."

"Once I was out of his proximity, he made little sense; he had to be physically present in his own narratives to make them plausible."

"Spinelli, Monkeypie, Blunderpuss..."

"Milly wrote fancy porn novels..."

"...bepimpled chin."

"In an uncanny, disturbing moment, I recognized that everyone in sight was barefoot, and I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was."

"You make a right turn here," Carlier said, "and you are in Rwanda."

"My grandfather was dead, and when he was not, he did not live in Zagreb..."

"...clusters of amputated limbs burning in a hospital oven, the poet facing the toy hell..."

"...Dedo is running down Sniper Alley and a woman is telling him that his shoe is untied, and with a perfect clarity of purpose, with the ultimate respect for death, he stoops to tie it, and the shooting ceases, for even the killers appreciate an orderly world."

"...And to tell you the truth, I cannot see a future in fluffing for him."

"...while Szmura would embark upon a volley of fucks ..."

"A few days later, spring parachuted into Chicago..."

"The next warning was written by Djordje, who threatened them with harsh motherfucking, overlooking the fact that fucking was not the strongest weapon of prepubescent boys."

Photo via jul89.