The Book of my lives; A Book, Reviewed

About two weeks ago I was to read couple of my poems published in Journal of Modern Poetry issue # 16 to an audience of poets at St. Augustine College Campus. Bhupen and I were about ten to fifteen minutes early. Our venue, The Chaplin Hall, was occupied by another audience who were intently listening to a reader at the podium.

We had read a little blurb affixed to the door before entering the room. The reader’s name is Aleksandar Hemon. He has won many prestigious grants and accolades. We peeked inside the room and ushered ourselves into empty seats. I did not know what he was reading from but assumed that it must be his latest book. In few minutes that I heard him I had no reason to get the picture of the content and the style of his writing. As a courtesy, we stayed on.

As he finished reading the excerpts from his creation he began to sign the books for those among the audience who bought his book. I without thinking bought one and had it signed by him.

On the way home I was beginning to cuss myself for having bought the book by an author I had no knowledge of. I knew I was not going to like it and therefore will not read it. I have been disappointed in almost all books I have read, especially if they are fictions. Dialogues in any book bore me to tears.

Well, I started to read this book. I read few pages every time I read it. And within two readings I began to like his style and the content; actually I loved it. On the third sitting I was so riveted that I refused to close the book without finishing it. And finish it I surely did!

It is more or less a memoir of a displaced Bosnian émigré; displaced from his own country and his adopted country as well; the USA. In his country due to changing winds and here due to new culture. It is a story of breaking-up of war riddled nation. It is a story of youths wanting to defy; change the nation if not the world. It is a story of friendships, experimentation. It is a story of family separated by circumstances. It is a story of colors, smells and sounds of times of growing up. It is a story of finding semblances of life and then losing it. It is a story of unfathomable tragedy.

Each chapter is a story; a life unto itself.

The stories became intensely absorbing because of the landscape it created. The backdrop of a society that was closed for so long to outside world makes it so; a communistic, a rigid, a constrictive society that youths want to free and change against the powerful regime and yet not want to lose the sense of where one belonged and came from. This sense of belonging matters profoundly. 

While not from such society myself, I still do identify.Most immigrants suffer displacements.

The author has the style I adore. I have not read one like this before. I will cite couple of excerpts here. At one point he writes:

"In this city, I had no human network within which I could place myself; my Sarajevo, the city that had existed inside me and was still in there, was subject to siege and destruction. My displacement was metaphysical to the precisely same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn’t live nowhere; I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo; a geography of the soul.”

At another point he writes "……..Peter’s outburst, shocking though it may have been, made perfect sense to me-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted.”

                                                          

Now this is the language from a man to whom not only English is a second language, but also the one who knew no English at all when he arrived in USA.

I can say two things; if I were to make as good a story in my life as his life made for him I had to live his kind of life; I have to live in his skin. Second, if I were to write as well as he does, I will have to be born again.

I am comforted by the fact that he shares with me the same beautiful skyline of Chicago.