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DISSECTING ROOM
The question of Bruno Aleksandar Hemon. London: Picador, 2000. Pp 240. £12·99. ISBN 0330393472.
“Blind Joseph Pronek and Dead Souls”, a superb 78-page novella, tells the story of a young Bosnian writer who emigrates to Chicago. The story explores a recurring theme in the collection: exile. The protagonist, Pronek, is a cross between E Annie Proulx’s Quoyle and Saul Bellow’s Herzog: hapless, erudite, and likeable. America, through his defamiliarising gaze, is not a pretty sight—a country plagued by jingoism and hubris. But it is also a story of great humour and wit. Hemon has some fun with language, contrasting the Americans’ slang with Pronek’s clumsy attempts at idiomatic English. The importance of language to one’s relation to the world—and to one’s self-image—is perhaps the collection’s dominant theme. In “Exchange of Pleasant Words”, the narrator speaks with great feeling about the immigrant existence: “we have to live these half-lives of people who cannot forget what they used to be and who are afraid of being addressed in a foreign language, no longer able to utter anything meaningful.” It could be, of course, that part of Hemon’s purpose in writing The question of Bruno was to find meaning in his new life in America. Irrespective of whether he has succeeded, this is a collection of grace, intelligence, and originality.
he prospect of writing fiction English centres around the metropoliwould make most people tan adventures of trendy twenty/thirty nervous. Have I got anything to somethings in London/New York, say? If so, can I say it well? Or will my Hemon’s stories turn over a very efforts be laughed out of literary different side of life—full of fear, agents’ in-trays? So imagine attempting isolation, brutality, and bloodshed. to write in somebody else’s language. In “Islands”—and with an allegorical Of course, many authors have done power reminiscent of Camus—Hemon this in the past. Joseph Conrad penned uses the struggle between snakes and all his masterpieces in English (his mongooses to gesture towards the third language), which was the second ethnic conflict in his homeland. language of Vladimir Nabokov. Yet the collection is far from Samuel Beckett had a penchant for relentlessly grisly. Hemon is a playful writing in French, as did T S Eliot. But and experimental writer, whose these are great names in modern favourite trick is to intertwine fact and literature—and only underline the fiction. He is fascinated by the intersecdifficulty of writing in a non-native tion of individual perspective with the tongue. impersonal, seismic movement of Now we have Aleksandar Hemon, history. In “The Accordion”, Archduke half-Ukrainian, half-Serb. Born in Franz Ferdinand, on his fateful trip to Sarajevo in 1964, he uprooted to Sarajevo, spots a musician in the Chicago in 1992. Although a published crowd, holding an accordion. The author in his own language, he has accordion player is the narrator’s greatbeen writing in English since only grandfather, who is destined to die in 1995. In his first book in his adopted the war that is triggered by the tongue, The question of Bruno, he gives assassin’s bullet. This mixing of the us seven short stories and a novella. imaginative and the historical also Even if you didn’t know that English gives a clue to Hemon’s ambition. was his second language, there are The question of Bruno is partly a history plenty of sentences to arouse your of Europe during the past century. Daniel Davies suspicions. For example: “He walked Time and again, however, he strikes [email protected] up a dilapidated sinuous road exuding a more autobiographical note. heat.” This, to me, reads like a translation, and makes me wonder about Hemon’s process. Did he think of the sentence in his first language and busy himself with English dictionaries to write it down in his second? But if some of the language is stilted and clumsy, much of it is startling in its virtuosity. In the same story, the narrator describes a dying mongoose: “There was a hole in its chest—the dog seemed to have bitten off a part of it—and I saw the heart, like a tiny tomato, pulsating, as if hiccupping, slower and slower.” This is both beautiful and terrifying in its precision, and one can sense Hemon’s satisfaction in the central simile. Both these sentences come from the opening story, Positive Negatives is an exhibition of photographs taken by six HIV-positive women in the “Islands”, a boy’s vision of a Democratic Republic of Congo. Organised by Christian Aid to coincide with World AIDS family trip to the island of Mljet Day, the photographs are on show at the Africa Centre, Covent Garden, London, UK, until that culminates in his uncle’s 15 Dec, 2000. recollections of life in one of Stalin’s labour camps. At a time when so much new fiction in
T
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • December 2, 2000
Christian Aid/Photo Voice/Annie
The half-lives of immigrants
1937
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.
The question of Bruno Aleksandar Hemon. London: Picador, 2000. Pp 240. £12·99. ISBN 0330393472.
“Blind Joseph Pronek and Dead Souls”, a superb 78-page novella, tells the story of a young Bosnian writer who emigrates to Chicago. The story explores a recurring theme in the collection: exile. The protagonist, Pronek, is a cross between E Annie Proulx’s Quoyle and Saul Bellow’s Herzog: hapless, erudite, and likeable. America, through his defamiliarising gaze, is not a pretty sight—a country plagued by jingoism and hubris. But it is also a story of great humour and wit. Hemon has some fun with language, contrasting the Americans’ slang with Pronek’s clumsy attempts at idiomatic English. The importance of language to one’s relation to the world—and to one’s self-image—is perhaps the collection’s dominant theme. In “Exchange of Pleasant Words”, the narrator speaks with great feeling about the immigrant existence: “we have to live these half-lives of people who cannot forget what they used to be and who are afraid of being addressed in a foreign language, no longer able to utter anything meaningful.” It could be, of course, that part of Hemon’s purpose in writing The question of Bruno was to find meaning in his new life in America. Irrespective of whether he has succeeded, this is a collection of grace, intelligence, and originality.
he prospect of writing fiction English centres around the metropoliwould make most people tan adventures of trendy twenty/thirty nervous. Have I got anything to somethings in London/New York, say? If so, can I say it well? Or will my Hemon’s stories turn over a very efforts be laughed out of literary different side of life—full of fear, agents’ in-trays? So imagine attempting isolation, brutality, and bloodshed. to write in somebody else’s language. In “Islands”—and with an allegorical Of course, many authors have done power reminiscent of Camus—Hemon this in the past. Joseph Conrad penned uses the struggle between snakes and all his masterpieces in English (his mongooses to gesture towards the third language), which was the second ethnic conflict in his homeland. language of Vladimir Nabokov. Yet the collection is far from Samuel Beckett had a penchant for relentlessly grisly. Hemon is a playful writing in French, as did T S Eliot. But and experimental writer, whose these are great names in modern favourite trick is to intertwine fact and literature—and only underline the fiction. He is fascinated by the intersecdifficulty of writing in a non-native tion of individual perspective with the tongue. impersonal, seismic movement of Now we have Aleksandar Hemon, history. In “The Accordion”, Archduke half-Ukrainian, half-Serb. Born in Franz Ferdinand, on his fateful trip to Sarajevo in 1964, he uprooted to Sarajevo, spots a musician in the Chicago in 1992. Although a published crowd, holding an accordion. The author in his own language, he has accordion player is the narrator’s greatbeen writing in English since only grandfather, who is destined to die in 1995. In his first book in his adopted the war that is triggered by the tongue, The question of Bruno, he gives assassin’s bullet. This mixing of the us seven short stories and a novella. imaginative and the historical also Even if you didn’t know that English gives a clue to Hemon’s ambition. was his second language, there are The question of Bruno is partly a history plenty of sentences to arouse your of Europe during the past century. Daniel Davies suspicions. For example: “He walked Time and again, however, he strikes [email protected] up a dilapidated sinuous road exuding a more autobiographical note. heat.” This, to me, reads like a translation, and makes me wonder about Hemon’s process. Did he think of the sentence in his first language and busy himself with English dictionaries to write it down in his second? But if some of the language is stilted and clumsy, much of it is startling in its virtuosity. In the same story, the narrator describes a dying mongoose: “There was a hole in its chest—the dog seemed to have bitten off a part of it—and I saw the heart, like a tiny tomato, pulsating, as if hiccupping, slower and slower.” This is both beautiful and terrifying in its precision, and one can sense Hemon’s satisfaction in the central simile. Both these sentences come from the opening story, Positive Negatives is an exhibition of photographs taken by six HIV-positive women in the “Islands”, a boy’s vision of a Democratic Republic of Congo. Organised by Christian Aid to coincide with World AIDS family trip to the island of Mljet Day, the photographs are on show at the Africa Centre, Covent Garden, London, UK, until that culminates in his uncle’s 15 Dec, 2000. recollections of life in one of Stalin’s labour camps. At a time when so much new fiction in
T
THE LANCET • Vol 356 • December 2, 2000
Christian Aid/Photo Voice/Annie
The half-lives of immigrants
1937
For personal use only. Not to be reproduced without permission of The Lancet.