The Unforgotten

Aleksandar Hemon’s fictional lives.

by James Wood July 28, 2008

The Bosnian-born Hemon is a postmodernist who has been mugged by history.

In Joseph Roth’s novel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, “The Radetzky March,” there is an extraordinary scene in which the varied soldiers of that vast, improbable portmanteau parade in Vienna before the Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph. Uniformed men stream by, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovenians, and—most remarkably and most exotically—Bosnians, vivid in their “blood-red fezzes,” which seemed to glow, Roth writes, like bonfires lit by Islam in tribute to the Emperor himself. Those blood-red fezzes are all Roth needs to conjure the distant romance of the Bosnian subjects, who disappear from the novelistic pageant as quickly as they flashed by.

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When he arrived here, at the age of twenty-eight, Hemon had what his publisher calls only a “basic command” of English. Eight years later, “The Question of Bruno” appeared, stories written in an English remarkable for its polish, lustre, and sardonic control of register. This conversion is often described as “Nabokovian,” and, indeed, Hemon’s writing sometimes reminds one of Nabokov’s. (Hemon has said that he learned English by reading Nabokov and underlining the words he didn’t recognize.) Yet the feat of his reinvention exceeds the Russian’s. Nabokov grew up reading English, and had been educated at Cambridge. When his American career began, in 1940, he was almost middle-aged, and had long experience in at least three languages. Hemon, by contrast, tore through his development in the new language with hyperthyroidal speed.

In those eight years, Hemon became not merely a proficient stylist but a superb one. Sometimes his English has the regenerative eccentricity of the immigrant’s, restoring buried meanings to words like “vacuous” and “petrified.” A sentence like this one stands at a slight angle to customary English usage: “I piled different sorts of blebby pierogi and a cup of limpid tea on my tray.” “Blebby” is wonderful, but, perhaps more wonderful, how many native English speakers would ever describe tea as limpid? Occasionally, he flourishes a lyrically pedantic Nabokovian bloom, as with the “fenestral glasses” a character wears.

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Angry, Vladimir Brik is rather indistinct; he could use some of Jozef Pronek’s bumbling, Pnin-like charm. (In a Ukrainian cemetery, Brik finds the stone of one Oleksandr Pronek, 1967-2002: the two dates representing, respectively, Jozef Pronek’s birth and the year of the publication of “Nowhere Man.”) Lost, homeless on two continents, Brik is poignant, and the novel is never more moving than when its narrator seems a little unhinged because a little unhoused. In his earlier work, Hemon circled around “King Lear” and Shakespeare’s great phrase “unaccommodated man,” the naked human animal Lear finds on the heath. Physically and metaphysically unaccommodated, Brik even imagines the Biblical Lazarus as a kind of unaccommodated man—the emblem of all immigrants. When Lazarus was raised by Jesus from the dead, Brik muses, did he remember being dead? Or did he just begin again? “Did he have to disremember his previous life and start from scratch, like an immigrant?” That beginning all over again would be the true Lazarus project. ♦