In some ways, the 15 nonfiction pieces in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives resemble the short stories in the author’s 2009 collection Love and Obstacles: the two books share settings—Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, and Chicago—and explore geographic and cultural dislocation. But where you had to tease the autobiographical elements out of the former volume, the essays here, some of which first appeared in the New Yorker, save you the trouble. In The Book of My Lives, Hemon’s exploration of identity is rich with psychological undertones. He’ll burrow into a psyche—often his own, but occasionally someone else’s—then clamber out with an armful of longings, neuroses, and fears.
The most intriguing and disturbing stories, though, concern the rabid nationalism of many Serbs during the Yugoslav wars—particularly their hatred of Bosnian Muslims, which resulted in wholesale slaughter. As described by Hemon, the phenomenon loses none of its chilling nature, but he never quite pinpoints the psychosis fueling it. Serb nationalists’ rage toward Muslims resembled that of the predominantly Maronite militias during the Lebanese civil war, and the anti-Sunni fury of the Alawite-dominated Syrian army and “shabbiha” militias today. The violence of these groups also stands out when compared to that of their enemies. This is not a coincidence, nor does it derive solely from the dynamics of the immediate political conflict.
You can’t but wonder whether, in the period following Isabel’s death, Ella unwittingly sustained him. Bereft of a child, he considers life scarcely worth living—except for those moments when he sees the daughter who remains continue to experience the joy of a fertile imagination and infinite streams of new words. Slowly, he begins to recover.
By Aleksandar Hemon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reading Wed 3/20, 7 PM, Tribune Tower, 435 N. Michigan, www.eventbrite.com, $15.
