Aleksandar Hemon: "The World and All That It Holds" (Fiction)
To try to define (that is, to confine within a definition) what Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds does and achieves would be as difficult as defining the author himself. Hemon is a Bosnian-American MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, a creative writing professor at Princeton University, a screenwriter (The Matrix Resurrections is among his credits), and an EDM artist producing under the name Cielo Hemon. But in his latest novel, from MCD x FSG, Hemon is a novelist nonpareil.
The story is sprawling, encompassing three and a half decades across five nations at a time when the notion of national boundaries is a fluid subject. The life of Rafael Pinto, a Jewish apothecary addicted to his own wares in Sarajevo, is turned upside down with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that sparked World War I. Pinto is conscripted, and while in reluctant service as a medic, he meets Osman, a fellow soldier and a Muslim, whose smile and stories charm everyone he meets, including Pinto. The two come together as naturally and inseparably as two drops of rain on a pane of glass, and they spend the next six years trying to stay alive and together through one revolution after another. Pinto’s epic journey takes him across a continent and face-to-face with death again and again. There are times where the story seems almost sadistic, as we watch Pinto progressively lose everything he knows and loves. I had the sense I was reading an expansion of Candide, if Voltaire’s novella had been thrice as long and Cunegonde had been a man. But whereas Voltaire the philosopher puts his hero through torture to win a philosophical argument, the brutality of Hemon’s novel never tips into the gratuitous. Pointless, yes, because war is pointless. But where Voltaire would make a joke, Hemon’s narrator paints with compassion. From beginning to end, The World and All That It Holds is a novel of relationships. In fact, Pinto might say that love is, at the end, all that the world holds. Faith, though it weaves throughout Pinto’s worldview, is not the loom that gives it shape. Hope is a flame that flickers, flares, and flames out as many times as the revolutionary fires are lit. But Love: That is a force that Pinto cannot escape, even when he tries.
The World and All That It Holds is not an easy read or a casual one. Hemon’s descriptions of bodies’ functions, malfunctions, and destruction are as fluent as his command of languages: The novel, written in English (which Hemon learned as an adult) frequently weaves in snatches of Bosnian, Spanjol, Yiddish, Kyrgyz, Tajik, and German, creating a sometimes dizzying effect for both the reader and the characters who speak a refugee’s amalgam of meaning — a private language that reflects their indescribable experiences across a thousand miles and thirty-odd years. To the postmodern philosophers’ question of whether language can ever truly convey one person’s meaning to another, Hemon’s answer seems to be definitively no. But of course, to conclude that the failure of language makes the notion of meaning, well, meaningless, is to deny the impact of Hemon’s work, as well as the reality and the dignity of lives like Pinto and Osman, whose stories might be lost to history were it not for the role of the storyteller.
If the novel falters at all, it is in its final moment: an epilogue in which our unseen narrator tells us how he supposedly came to know of Pinto and Osman. It is an envelope to the story that the story does not need. But maybe Hemon’s argument does. If it is true that what matters is not what happens to us but what we make of it, then Hemon seems to be saying that Pinto and Osman matter as little as the thousand other refugees swept aside in the world’s wars. But it is what we do with their lives — and ours — and the meaning we make of them that determines whether we will be remembered for our great love or lost to the great obscurity.
— Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Managing Editor
