Love, loss, history and exile in Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel
“The World and All That It Holds” spans continents and a century
“You go to sleep in one world, wake up in another,” muses the narrator of Aleksandar Hemon’s fourth novel. Something similar happened to the Sarajevo-born author himself. In 1992 the implosion of Yugoslavia shattered his Bosnian homeland and left him stranded in Chicago. He weathered odd jobs and hard knocks to emerge—with the publication in 2000 of his short-story collection, “The Question of Bruno”—as an English-language writer of verbal agility and ethical finesse.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The course of true love”
Culture January 28th 2023
From the January 28th 2023 edition
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