This time, the writing of Aleksandar Hemon is fully autobiographical: “To write about a life, you need a life to write about. Or you used to, anyway. Hemon, as his book’s title implies, has a surfeit. His are the multiple lives of the uprooted: the remembered life of his upbringing in Bosnia, the transposed life of the new immigrant to Chicago and the present life of the author, husband, father.”
>review (c) THE NEW STATESMAN, 2013
In his recent Book of My Lives (p. 97-101), the Bosnian American author Aleksandar Hemon (see post above) digs out one of the best-hidden skeletons in the closets of the University of Sarajevo: Professor Nikola Nikola Koljević (1936-97), a Professor of English and internationally renowned Shakespeare expert. Continue reading
“How an Irish setter helped my family get through the Bosnian War.”
A literary essay in Cultural Kynological Studies by Aleksandar Hemon
“My sister and Veba remember the last time they took Mek and Don for a walk before the war started. It was April 1992, and there was shooting up in the hills around Sarajevo; a Yugoslav People’s Army plane menacingly broke the sound barrier above the city; the dogs barked like crazy. They said: ‘See you later!’ to each other as they parted, but would not see each other for five years.”
>read full text (c) GRANTA / Slate.com, 2012 (reblogged)
delirium clemens 