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.
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