Around the World in Books / Yugoslavia-2 (Bosnia)
The Enduring Grief of Immigrants Forced To Leave Their Homelands
An uprooted Bosnian man narrates stories by an acclaimed writer
This is the second of two posts about books by authors from the former Yugoslavia.The first reviewed memoir by a journalist from Serbia.
All of the short stories in Aleksandar Hemon’s Love and Obstacles are about ambiguous loss, the term therapists use for unresolved grief for people who are physically present but psychologically absent or physically absent but psychologically present. The tales involve characters who are, as one of them says, “There, but not there.”
Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo of Ukrainian descent and stranded in the U.S. when the Bosnian War broke out while he was visiting Chicago in 1992. Since settling America he has won a MacArthur “genius” grant and has been a four-time finalist for two major literary prizes, the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also co-wrote, with David Mitchell, the script for the film The Matrix Resurrections.
The eight linked stories in Love and Obstacles offer rich evidence of the gifts that have made him one the country’s most distinguished writers. Their…
