The Evolution of Aleksandar Hemon

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.”

Love is about the immigrant’s 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.