Aleksandar Hemon
The situation was a far cry from what Mr. Hemon had encountered when he first arrived in Chicago in March 1992 for what was supposed to be a brief visit on a program sponsored by the United States government. Almost immediately, the war in Bosnia erupted, leaving him stranded without a job and, perhaps even more worrisome for someone whose livelihood depends on language, without a full command of English.
“I was cut off from my previous life, in despair,” Mr. Hemon (pronounced HEH-mon) said in an interview at his favorite neighborhood cafe here. “I had this horrible, pressing need to write because things were happening. I needed to do it the same way I needed to eat, but I just had no language to write in. I couldn’t do it, and so I thought I should enable myself to do it.”
Mr. Hemon, 44, who had been a journalist in Sarajevo, set a five-year target to write and publish a story in English; to force himself to speak the language, he took jobs canvassing for Greenpeace and selling magazine subscriptions door to door. He also read voraciously in English, storing words he didn’t know on note cards, and within three years had achieved his goal.
“Even then, his prose was full of small surprises and had a wonderful and profoundly meaningful tension between a dark subject material and a manner that can seem playful or even offhand,” said Reg Gibbons, a poet and Northwestern University literature professor who at the time was editor of TriQuarterly, the literary magazine that published that first story, “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders.” “It wasn’t just the angle at which he sees things, but the language itself, which had a kind of hyper, acute sense of the possibilities of English that a native speaker wouldn’t necessarily have.”
Since then, Mr. Hemon, known as Sasha, has written four critically praised books and, in 2004, also won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. His latest work, “Love and Obstacles,” a short-story collection set mainly in Chicago and the former Yugoslavia, was published by Riverhead Books this week. The eight stories in “Love and Obstacles” were written at the same time that Mr. Hemon was working on his novel “The Lazarus Project,” which was published last year and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Like his two previous works, “Nowhere Man” and “The Question of Bruno,” they deal mostly with themes of cultural identity, conflict and displacement, often featuring characters of Eastern European origin who have been set adrift and are struggling, in ways both poignant and bitterly humorous, to assimilate America as it assimilates them.
“I am very cynical, but I don’t think Sasha is,” said Velibor Bozovic, a Bosnian photographer now living in Montreal whom Mr. Hemon considers his best friend. “He can be very ironic, but beneath everything is a strong moral sense.”
A hallmark of Mr. Hemon’s style is his fondness for unusual coinages, in particular the way he pairs adjectives and nouns that may at first glance seem unlikely companions. Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at The New Yorker, recalls being struck by a passage in “Szmura’s Room,” one of the stories in the new book, in which Mr. Hemon described someone curled up in a fetal position as “shrimping.”
“Sasha has a rare combination of gifts,” she said. “There’s a fantastic vitality to his writing, an unusual denseness and richness. He has an amazing vocabulary, which is wedded to a playfulness and a willingness to experiment that serves him well.”
Critics have tended to assume that Mr. Hemon’s use of such techniques is a result of his writing in a language that was originally foreign to him. But he says it’s not, and relates it to his broader distaste for minimalism: “I do it in Bosnian just as much, if not more, because it’s part of my sensibility, because I respond to the sensuality of adjectives.”
Partly because of his émigré origins and Slavic background — his father, an engineer, is of Ukrainian descent and his mother, an accountant, is Serbian — Mr. Hemon is often compared to Vladimir Nabokov. He readily acknowledges the influence, saying that he considers “Lolita” “the greatest American novel” and Nabokov a master stylist.
But in a more general way, Mr. Hemon shows a preference for writers whose work, like Nabokov’s in both Russian and English, addresses and conveys a sense of displacement. Asked to list some favorites, he immediately named Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, Franz Kafkaand Isaac Babel.
“It’s the complicated situation, and then the complicated language that comes with that,” he said. “That complication always finds somehow a reflection in language.”
Though Mr. Hemon is now an American citizen and considers himself an American writer, he noted that “I have as many words written in Bosnian since 1995 as in English,” thanks to a column he writes for a magazine in Sarajevo. “I think it is exhilarating to maintain a simultaneous presence in two cultures, and I don’t see any reason to have to choose,” he added.
In some ways, Edgewater, the neighborhood where Mr. Hemon and his wife, an African-American photo editor whom he met in Chicago, have chosen to settle reproduces what he liked most about Sarajevo: its cosmopolitanism. He noted with pleased astonishment a study that found that 120 different languages are spoken in his Chicago neighborhood, and rattles off a list of the groups represented: Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis, Peruvians, Central Americans, Italians, Jews and, of course, Bosnians.
“I never wanted to go anywhere, not in Sarajevo and not here,” he said. “I am a loyalist by temperament, and I always thought there was something to gain by staying in the same place for a long time. In Sarajevo, if you find the right position in a coffee shop, then the whole city will walk by. But you cannot move.”
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