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For
a fiction writer, Aleksandar Hemon hews close to the facts.
The narrators of the eight stories in Love and Obstacles
are mostly Bosnian men who grew up in Sarajevo and immigrated
to the United States—by accident—in 1992, when war
broke out in Bosnia, stranding them in Chicago. These narrators
have one sister, a mother and father who immigrated to Canada,
and strange memories of a detour early in life, when their
fathers were Bosnian diplomats and the family was stationed
in Zaire. The narrators are almost always fiction writers.
These details come straight from Aleksandar Hemon's life.
But that doesn't mean the stories are straightforward or even
true.
One of
the two things Hemon does brilliantly in Love and Obstacles—his
second collection of stories—is bluff his way across
the border between simple biography and more complicated ground.
"American Commando" is about a Bosnian boy and his motley
friends who launch a futile war, using rocks and lighter fluid,
against the construction workers who are demolishing the garden
in their housing project. Their tale is narrated by one of
Hemon's stand-ins, who is describing this story from his youth
on camera to a friend for a documentary she is making:
We
summoned all the veterans of previous wars, all the kids
who had enjoyed the garden of freedom, for a war council
where we were to decide what to do…. But only seven showed
up: Djordje, Vampir, Boris, Edo, Mahir, myself, and inexplicably,
Marina.
"What happened to them?"
"When?"
"In the war?"
"Which war?"
"The real war."
"Oh, I don't know. I have to think about it."
The friend
repeatedly interrupts the narrator and tries to draw him back
to the larger war in Bosnia, which is the subject of her film,
but the narrator prefers to talk about what he remembers from
his youth. In another multilayered story, "The Bees, Part
1," a Hemon-like narrator recounts his crotchety father's
absolute and lifelong opposition to anything that is not "real,"
from implausible movies to nightmares to novels. To build
a monument to "the truth," the father borrows a Super 8 camera
and tries to film his autobiography, casting his son, the
narrator, in the lead role. They film a scene called, "I leave
home to go to school":
The
first take failed because I didn't wave with enough emotion.
My hand, my father said, looked like a limp plucked chicken.
He needed more emotion from me. I was leaving home never
to return.
The second take was interrupted as my father decided to
zoom in on a bee that just happened to land on a flower
nearby.
My two aunts suddenly appeared in the third take, as my
father was panning from my poignant good-bye to the house.
They stood grinning, paralyzed by the lens for a moment,
then casually waved at the camera.
Each time, I had to walk uphill to my starting position,
so I could walk away downhill in the next take. My legs
hurt, I was thirsty and hungry, and I could not help questioning
my father's directorial wisdom: Why wasn't he/I taking
a bus? Didn't he/I need more stuff than what could fit
in a bundle? Didn't he/I need some food for the road?
During the fifth take, the camera ran out of film.
Throughout
Love and Obstacles, Hemon uses his biography as a springboard
for launching into more fictional stories. But he also encourages
the reader to question the mechanisms by which his stories
are understood in the first place.
The second
thing Hemon does brilliantly is squeeze his narrators into
tight spots where they're neither the bumbling immigrant nor
the savvy American. Rather than focus on the well-known dichotomies
of the immigrant experience, Hemon borrows from his own unique
backstory, with all its details, to explore situations that
are less predictable and more emotionally precise. The narrator
of "The Conductor" has always been in awe of a fellow Bosnian
immigrant whose poetry is better and more widely read than
his, and he worries that he doesn't measure up to his countryman's
authenticity. He spends his book tour "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. It never happened: I was
Bosnian, I looked and conducted myself like a Bosnian, and
everyone was content to think that I was in constant, uninterrupted
communication with the tormented soul of my homeland."
And in
"Szmura's Room," when a Ukrainian-American character says
he wants to help a new arrival from Bosnia integrate into
society, he's interrupted by a friend: "'Integrate,' the brother
with the beer said all of a sudden. 'Where'd you learn such
a fancy word?'" All of Hemon's main characters are too individual
and too animated to fit neatly into the paradigm of insiders
and outsiders.
A description
of Hemon's virtues as a writer leaves almost no room to praise
his bleak sense of humor or his keen ear for surprising turns
of phrase, like the embarrassing relatives who "exterminate"
the food on their plates, or the guard whose stocky head "resembled
an armchair." But this is a marvelous collection, both entertaining
and confounding, that seems to make questions about identity
and belonging even harder to answer.
(June,
2009)
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