Love and Obstacles

Starred review from February 2, 2009
Bosnian-born Hemon (The Lazarus Project
) again beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories. The 1992 Bosnian war colors in the background of all the tales, whose settings range from Africa to Chicago and Sarajevo. Arranged chronologically, all but one feature a Hemon-like narrator named Bogdan, first met as a surly teenager during his diplomat father's assignment in Zaire, where he's happily corrupted by a degenerate American espionage agent. In each successive story, Bogdan recalls the surreal and salient experiences of his life: his youth with his ironically depicted family; his early determination to be a poet; his accidental sojourn in America, where he was caught after the commencement of hostilities in Bosnia; and his return to a “cesspool of insignificant, drizzly suffering,” where he has a transformative night interviewing a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. Hemon arranges words like gems in a necklace. A necktie is “stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon”; a car is “stickered with someone else's thought”; a character's teeth are “like organ pipes.” Writing with steely control and an antic eye, Hemon has assembled another extraordinary work.

Starred review from April 1, 2009
A master of modern literary gamesmanship returns with a short-story collection that just might be a novel, with elements that closely parallel the author's career.

National Book Award–nominated author Hemon (The Lazarus Project, 2008, etc.), a Bosnian now based in Chicago who has had several stories published in the New Yorker, offers a series of interconnected, first-person narratives about a Bosnian writer who moves to Chicago and has a story called"Love and Obstacles" published in the New Yorker. Yet the author has something more profound than guessing games and literary puzzles in mind. These eight stories, chronologically sequenced, follow the unnamed narrator from his formative years as an aspiring boy poet (he quotes some lines from a poem titled, naturally,"Love and Obstacles") through his relocation to Chicago just before the siege of Sarajevo and on to his achievement of some literary accomplishment. The protagonist testifies to the inspiration of Conrad and Rimbaud (he calls The Drunken Boat"my bible"), making more contemporary references to Led Zeppelin and Sonic Youth as well. Throughout, he deals with the challenges of art, the essence of identity and the"merciless passing of time." He contrasts the loftiness of literature with his experiences as a door-to-door magazine salesman: His blue-collar customers"did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end." Though each is self-contained, the stories benefit from echoes and resonances, recurring themes and characters (particularly the narrator's parents). Complicated relationships with other artists—an established poet, a documentary filmmaker, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist—underscore the twists of truth and fiction, the slippery slopes of memory and identity.

Not as ambitious as The Lazarus Project, but no work by Hemon is a minor effort.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2009
In this book of eight short stories by Bosnian American writer Hemon ("The Lazarus Project"), the bold, humorous, and unpredictable writing makes readers forget that love has been coupled with other nouns in book titles so frequently that it's become clich. The same narrator links the stories; some characters are recurring; and, as in some of Hemon's earlier fiction, a common theme is the narrator's active role in shaping his own persona, an endeavor that transcends nationality. In "Death of the American Commando," the narrator tells a young woman interviewing him for a documentary a grotesque fabrication from his childhood that counteracts the charming stories his mother told her when she visited his family. In "The Noble Truths of Suffering," the narrator, after some success himself as a writer, is barely able to hide his affected aloofness in the presence of a Pulitzer Prize winner. In both stories, the narrator loathes and craves their adulation. Readers who've enjoyed Hemon's earlier fiction won't be disappointed; readers who are new to Hemon will be grateful that they've discovered a refreshingly uncorrupted voice. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/09.]K. H. Cumiskey, Duke Univ. Libs., Durham, NC

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2009
Beginning with the lancing stories in The Question of Bruno (2000) and extending into his tour de force, The Lazarus Project (2008), MacArthur fellow Hemon has been grappling withhome, hate, and war withinthe crushing and ludicrous adventures of young Bosnian men growing up indoomed Yugoslavia, then plunging into the confounding demands of exile in America. In this riveting cycle of linked stories-within-stories, Hemons wannabe-poet narrator is abruptly introducedto geopolitical sleaze in Kinshasa, where his diplomat fatheris posted in 1983. Back home in Sarajevo, he runs amok on his first solo journey and sits at the feet of a celebrated poet, fueled by both reverence and resentment. He then travels to America just before war breaks out and discovers that obstacles to love loom everywhere. Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelingsinto concrete imageryin masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, andunquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)