Image: Canva.
On 28 June 1914, on the Latinska ćuprija in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and future ruler of recently annexed Bosnia. That it was a Bosnian Serb who killed him led to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on the Kingdom of Serbia, igniting the bomb that would become World War I. This same incident is the spark from which Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel, The World and All That It Holds, is lit. Softened by laudanum and an illicit kiss with an Austrian Rittmeister, Sephardic doctor and dandy Rafael Pinto bears witness to the assassination and to the moment that sets his life off in ricochet.
Two years later, he’s a conscript in the Austro-Hungarian army, in love with Muslim orphan and fellow Sarajevan Osman Karišik, and immersed in events more brutal than he could hope to survive. But survive he does: first the Brusilov offensive in Galicia (present-day north-western Ukraine), then a prisoner of war camp and Bolshevik revolution in Tashkent, then the blood-thirsty Baron Teutenberg and a trek across the deserts of central Asia, all the way to 1937 Shanghai and the second Sino-Japanese war.
Along the way, Pinto loses Osman, gains their daughter Rahela, becomes a different man. Although gone, Osman’s voice threads its way through Pinto’s world: warning Pinto of what’s to come, cajoling him out of opium-saturated fugues, singing to him in bed. He is the lifeline along which Pinto can crawl—begrudgingly, resignedly—towards his fate. The World and All That It Holds is an epic, sweeping in scope and propulsive, a saga over decades and continents. But more than anything it’s a story of a man trying to come home to his love.
Thrilling, theatrical storytelling that sweeps the reader up.
For most of the book, it’s intriguingly unclear exactly who’s telling this story. At first it seems possible it might be Pinto, later a particularly enthusiastic historian, or perhaps even Hemon’s frequent stand-in, Jozef Pronek (a figure who shares much of Hemon’s biography and the protagonist of Hemon’s 2000 novella Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls and 2002 novel Nowhere Man). But this narrator is slipperier than Pronek, sliding in and out between words and languages (English, Bosnian, German and Spanjol, to name a few), pontificating with grandiose eloquence on God, poetry and history, and casting an omniscience which is both wide (over history and geography) and deep.
At times he admits to not knowing what happened to Pinto, and years pass between chapters. At other times, the line between the two is blurred to the point of fusion: the narrator knows the inside of Pinto’s head so intimately that we mistake it for his own. ‘Who installed this thunderous heart inside my chest?’ he writes early on, and it’s unclear if this thought belongs to Pinto, or to the narrator, or to both.
While it is common for Hemon and his protagonists to blur into a kind of oneness, this effect is usually borne out of their shared biographies of displacement and Hemon’s consistent wry, observational style. Here, the narrator operates at a different frequency: he is more of a showman-storyteller, gripped by the tale he is recounting and swept up in his own telling. A raconteur who gestures, repeats himself, puts on voices, offers asides, makes happy use of cliff hangers and parries into the future in moments of cryptic foreshadowing. It is thrilling, theatrical storytelling that sweeps the reader up along with it, desperate—as we have become—to find out what happens next.
Epic, sweeping in scope and propulsive, a saga over decades and continents.
Through the drama, Hemon’s better-known face peeps through. In places, the tone grows distant, prosaic, particularly during descriptions of war, where its brutality is made uncompromisingly clear, and so too is its absurdity: ‘Smail Tokmak […] was obviously and completely dead, what with the top of his head missing,’ for example. Such sardonic wit is a welcome reprieve from what in many places are unremittingly gory descriptions of death and dying. Like other Bosnians writing on this side of the 1990s, Hemon does not shirk from the horror of war, he insists on it.
But underneath the darkness, there is tenderness, joy, humour: a newborn kissed on the head ‘tastes like chicken liver’, and toes are twice described poking out of ragged socks like potatoes from a sack. This isn’t descriptive laziness but a conscious decision to embody the book’s own storytellers; particularly Osman, who himself repeats well-liked turns of phrase and axioms, demonstrating the zeal for storytelling that our narrator models himself from. When Osman recounts stories and fairy tales to his comrades on the front lines, our narrator dives into them fully, and then weaves them into the same narrative cloth as Pinto’s life, as Osman’s death.
This is an intermingling of the real and the impossible, a kind of fantastical relation to the world not dissimilar to the magical realism found in Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie, or in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (albeit for Hemon, the dead bring no darkness with them). A closer cousin might be Saša Stanišić, another Bosnian writer living in the diaspora. Like Hemon, Stanišić has a penchant for the Balkan fantastical, and for the way our mythology penetrates our history, bringing both alive in the present.
Aside from the talking dead, however, The World and All That It Holds’ relationship to mythology is less ambiguous than in Stanišić’s work: stories remain stories without slipping across the metaphysical divide. Yet they arise and are repeated until what’s left is a shard buried in Pinto’s—and the reader’s—heart: ‘Was it you who made shade for my daughter?’; ‘I am a nothing and a nobody’; ‘la gran eskuridad’ [the great darkness]; bejturan and ruže [wormwood and roses]; ‘You will never be cold again.’
Hemon has much sympathy for these nobodies; they are his people.
When the narrator spirals out of his intimacy with Pinto and into grand reportage, he turns to paraphrasing ‘Moser’, an ostensibly historical figure whose autobiographical works inform the story. He writes, for example, that despite much research, ‘Osman Karišik attains a shape in historical documents and books only once,’ allegedly in Moser’s Sparking the Fire. Although fictionalised, this is not the first time Hemon has used little-remembered historical figures as fulcrums around which to turn a narrative: in The Lazarus Project, he retold the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish teen and alleged anarchist killed by Chicago police.
In this case, Hemon has based Moser on the British spy Frederick Bailey, and Osman on a Sarajevan man that Bailey actually met, as recounted in his memoir Mission to Tashkent. While not a historical figure per se, I trace another inspiration—this time for Pinto—in the subject of Hemon’s 2018 essay ‘Gay, Muslim, Refugee’. Kemalemir Frashto is a Bosnian Muslim who escaped a concentration camp and the ethnic cleansing of Foča, in part by being guided to safety by a melek (an angel-like figure in Islam), in much the same way as Pinto is guided by Osman. There are other similarities, too. Both men lost everything after a spark of war was lit in Bosnia; both are queer, haunted by depression in the face of utter, devastating loss; both sought escapes from their worldly pain; both are refugees and nobodies, unremembered by history.
Hemon has much sympathy for these nobodies; they are his people. His grandfather left Ukraine for Bosnia just before World War I and he himself left Sarajevo for Chicago just before the Bosnian war, becoming part of the rough quarter of Bosnians who live in the diaspora, who did not go back after the war (of which I am also a member). Ours was a relatively small war, contained to an overlooked corner of Europe, and it is often forgotten. So too its victims and its survivors. Like all wars, it was one of competing narratives, narratives of who we were, how we got there.
Hemon and I come from a place where Europe rubs against its Eastern neighbours, a region which has historically been one of movement and flow, marked by the southern migration of the Slavs, and the westward spread of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. A region which has increasingly become a place of nationalist fortification and Euro-centric chauvinism, a frontier between ‘civilised Europe’ and the rest of the world.
Hemon is tender and expansive, homing in on the rootless body.
It’s no wonder then that Hemon is fascinated by human movement, by the way that histories shift in the process. Faced with the fallibility of historical memory and the false sense of geo-cultural isolation it perpetuates, Hemon (like Stanišić, like Rushdie) chooses to trouble the boundary between history and fiction; chooses storytelling, narrative. His writing seeks, always, to manifest the ways in which we use narrative to assemble ourselves, and makes clear his belief that any narrative at all is necessitated by migration: a story moves from place to place, person to person. There is no such thing as identity, only movement. The World and All That it Holds is his most ambitious work, one that renders this movement in a long arc of human history, sending characters spilling across the globe, dust scattered in the fight(s) between warring powers, caught up in the tumult of history.
Against these surging tides, Hemon is tender and expansive, homing in on the rootless body, the vulnerable smallness of individual humanity, the tiny movements we make away from and towards one another. When Osman sings the sevdalinkah ‘Bejturan’ in Bosnian, he is singing a song that Pinto’s mother, a descendant of Sephardic refugees from Spain, sang to young Pinto in Spanjol. Pinto is confused by this, but Osman is not: everyone knows this song, it has been moving along with its people, one to the other.
The world of The World and All That it Holds is brutal, cold and unforgiving but within it, we find one another, again and again.
