The Book of My Lives
MacArthur fellow Hemon’s potent fiction (Love and Obstacles, 2009) is seeded with autobiographical elements now brought forward in his first book of nonfiction. In revised versions of essays first published in Granta and the New Yorker, Hemon chronicles with defining intensity, rueful self-critique, and piquant humor indelible revelations personal, cultural, and political. He is passionate about his hometown, Sarajevo, which he ardently explored and wrote about as a young militant journalist, to the point of realizing “that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority.” This made his exile in the U.S. after war broke out in his homeland while he was away all the more excruciating. In his incisive, masterfully crafted, and complexly affecting family stories; Sarajevo exploits, including the party-performance piece that led to a 13-hour interrogation at State Security; tales of remapping the “geography of the soul” in Chicago, his adopted home; and his staggering chronicle of his daughter’s tragic death, Hemon writes with deft force, piercing observation, and commanding candor about the individual’s place within life’s web and the horrors and beauty of the human condition. --Donna Seaman