Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian who left his country as a young man before the war tore his country apart. In Chicago, he learned his craft as a writer, in English, and now sees his stories regularly printed in the New Yorker magazine. His fine second volume of short stories, Love and Obstacles, contains eight linked meditations on sex, love, war, writing, and dispossession.

Told in the first person by  Hemon’s stand-in, a young writer from Bosnia with a similar personal history, each story expresses the pain of growing up in a world in which girls are the ultimate (and unattainable) pleasure, writing is the ultimate endeavor, and war the ultimate tragedy.

The memorable first story, “Stairway to Heaven,” finds the narrator as a teenager in Zaire.

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drum: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.

We soon learn that the narrator is sixteen and, as this passage conveys, prone to over-dramatization.

His father is a minor Yugoslav diplomat and the family is holed up in an apartment, virtual prisoners of the violence in the country. He falls in with the next door neighbor, a wild young American diplomat and his sexy girlfriend. He dallies with drugs, only to be discovered by his parents. A final encounter with the American draws an arc from fascination to disillusion.

In “The Conductor,” we meet Muhamed D., one of Bosnia’s greatest poets, who befriends the young writer, who, in his early teens, writes dozens of poems every day. But, Muhamed D. is a real poet, and intuiting that the young man is only a poet manque, chooses to address him as “Dirigent,” turning him fancifully into an orchestra conductor. Over the term of the relationship, the young man witnesses the poet’s vital and courageous poetic output during the siege of Sarajevo, and learns what real poetry is all about. Later, the poet visits the U.S. and they enjoy a wild, drunken night, ending with the young man’s coming to understand that beauty takes many, unexpected shapes.

Hemon saves the best for last. “The Noble Truths of Suffering” depicts an encounter between the young writer, now himself published in the New Yorker and visiting his parents in Sarajevo, and Dick Macalister, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist on a State Department visit to Sarajevo. Macalister resembles Tim O’Brien or Robert Stone, writers of war and its aftermath. A drunken night together followed by lunch with the young writer’s parents the next day, leaves a lasting impression, with the young writer diligently following Macalister’s future work, hoping to find himself used as creative fodder. The story has a trick ending, which I won’t give away, except to say that we come to view the difference between the Bosnian and the American indistinguishable.

In the final story, the writer’s mother asks Macalister if her son is any good as a writer. The reply is “It takes a while to become a writer.” Macalister said, “I think he’s well on his way.” No, Aleksandar Hemon has arrived.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.

Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)

• A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Seurat) - August 3, 2013
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• Cafe Terrace at Night (Van Gogh) - July 13, 2013
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