Way Out of Sarajevo

Ulf Andersen / Getty Images Bosnian-born novelist Aleksandar Hemon discusses his autobiographical new short-story collection—and what it’s like to have a writer (and fellow Chicagoan) in the White House.

Aleksandar Hemon is a big guy (think soccer) with a strong voice. In person, the MacArthur Fellowship-winner is funny, in a dark, bluesy way. That sardonic voice propels his fiction, including the eight stories in his new collection, Love and Obstacles. The new stories are characterized by an invigorating approach to the English language, and an observant, knowing, and a sharp-tongued narrator, who, like Hemon, was born in Bosnia, lives in the U.S., and belongs nowhere. “I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop,” Hemon says. “The way my imagination works is that I compulsively imagine alternative scenarios to the situations in my life.” And, he says, he sees life as “simultaneously funny and horrible.” (See his “The Noble Truths of Suffering,” part of The New Yorker’s winning entry for the 2008 National Magazine Award, here.)

“I imagine that [Obama] is able to see life from different points of view, which is what reading literature can train you to do. I’d rather have a reader in the White House than a decider.”

I first saw Hemon onstage during the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival Cabaret, reading from his novel, The Lazarus Project. The book is narrated by a Bosnian immigrant in present-day Chicago, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and National Book Awards. He read from the book at the Chicago Associated Writing Programs conference a few months ago. At dinner afterward it was clear he had developed a fan’s enthusiasm for Chicago.

No wonder. Hemon was stranded there in 1992, at the end of a cultural exchange program for journalists, when his hometown, Sarajevo, came under siege. He was granted political asylum. He couldn’t write in his native language. “War, trauma,” he says cryptically. So he taught himself English. By 1995 he had written the first story in his collection The Question of Bruno. His second collection, The Nowhere Man, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. (More on his Web site)

We reconnected in April, just before Hemon headed to Sarajevo for two weeks to launch the translations of The Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles.

How is your work perceived in Sarajevo?

I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement. A lot of people there like my work, and even me, but there are those too who hate it, and me, few and far between though they may be. I’ve been writing a column in a Sarajevo magazine for the past 17 years and have, happily, pissed off a lot of people.

Love and Obstacles. By Aleksandar Hemon. 224 pages. Riverhead. $25.95. Could you explain some of the elements of Chicago that appeal to you?

I am at home in Chicago, to a large extent because I sought the things that I thought a hometown should have—a steady barber, a coffee shop where they know what I drink, a bar where you can talk to the owner, a history that includes you, friends, family, a large number of various complicated humans whose very presence prevents any kind of purity or prescriptive order, enough people to play and discuss soccer with.

You met your wife, Teri Boyd, in Chicago?

She was editing a book of photos about Chicago and wanted writers who live here to contribute. So our first meeting was a business meeting. Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she’s already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.

When did you first hear about Barack Obama?

I went to an antiwar demonstration in 2003 and Obama had just finished his speech—I missed it—but the people were still trembling with excitement and the guy next to me said something to the effect of “He is going to be president one day.” He was a state senator at the time.