Wobblibility
Christopher Tayler: Aleksandar Hemon, 23 May 2013
The Book of My Lives
by Aleksandar Hemon.
Picador, 224 pp., £20, March 2013,978 1 4472 1090 0 Show More
by Aleksandar Hemon.
Picador, 224 pp., £20, March 2013,
“... My story is boring,’ the narrator says in Aleksandar Hemon’s story ‘The Conductor’, in Love and Obstacles (2009): ‘I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America.’ He means it’s boring in comparison with the character he’s discussing, a Muslim poet from Sarajevo who stays put for the siege and later awes his hosts in Iowa City with week-long drinking binges and furious bouts of composition ... ”