With all due respect to extravagant Scotsmen and
polite Frenchmen, sometimes ethnic stereotypes are very true. Due to a
bleak history culminating in a nasty, prolonged civil war, many
Bosnians have a very bitter, and very dark, sense of humor. Bosnian
American writer Aleksandar Hemon has built a career out of finding
laughter in darkness—his debut collection of stories, The
Question of Bruno, is one of the darkest, most brutal books to be
published to critical acclaim in the last 10 years. But with last
year’s novel The Lazarus Project and especially with Love and
Obstacles, his newest collection of linked stories, Hemon has been
refocusing his Bosnian identity through a lens of American immigrant
experience.
Like Nabokov, another immigrant author working in an adopted
language, Hemon’s fiction has become more and more self-reflexive. The
stories in Love are about a young poet named Bogdan who moves to
America and gradually becomes a writer of short stories (at least one
of which is published, as Hemon’s have been, in The New
Yorker) and, ultimately, a book called Love and Obstacles.
In one story, Bogdan’s father calls him to request, “in his Tarzan
English,” a favor for a member of their family. When Bogdan refuses,
the response is a bitter insult: “‘You’ve become American,’ he said
disconsolately.” Much of Love echoes that condemnation. A
creation story told to Bogdan early in the book, in the best story in
the collection, “Stairway to Heaven,” explains the sadness of that
situation:
“There’s a tribe here… that believes that the first man and woman
slid down from the skies on a rope. God let them down on a rope, they
untied themselves and the boss pulled the rope up. And that’s exactly
what happened, my friend. We were dropped down here and we wanna go
back up, but there’s no rope. So here you are, Blunderpuss, and the
rope is gone.”
It’s a desolate landscape, but Hemon is able to find the grace in
it. (“Everything looked more beautiful from the top of the Mountain of
Doom,” he writes in “Death of the American Commando.”) Love is
about that kind of weary, aimless wandering, and as with much of
Hemon’s fiction, Joseph Conrad—that patron saint of pointless,
tragic journeys—is referenced multiple times. But there’s
something new at work here. There’s still the sad Eastern European
humor (“‘Life is death if you don’t have a little drink every now and
then,’ concluded the Serbian wisely, and chugged from the bottle.”),
but if you’re paying attention to Love, you’ll find a tiny
amount of hope spackled thinly in the cracks.
In “The Bees, Part One,” Bogdan decides to try to shape his father’s
attempts at writing into something resembling a book. Books had always
been a wedge between the two men: “Whatever conveyed reality earned my
father’s unqualified appreciation… nothing insulted him more than
literature; the whole concept was a scam.” Working on his father’s
turgid prose—”Father devotes nearly a page to the moment he first
recognized a queen bee”—is an effort that ultimately results in
heartbreak, but the mere fact that Bogdan commits to the project, tries
to collaborate with his father on something that both men can be proud
of, feels supremely American. Hemon will always have that sharp Bosnian
sense of humor, but he continues to evolve.