Love and Obstacles
Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation and his MacArthur genius grantfor his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in The New Yorker, and several of those have also been included in The Best American Short Stories. All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time. What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man wholike Hemon himselfwas raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complicationsthe obstaclesof growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because its Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction achingly human, charming, and inviting.
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Judging by this collection, Aleksandar Hemon is an average storyteller. Well, average in the sense of literary talent. His characters are pretty average. In most ways, Hemon's stories seem pretty average.
Where Hemon stands out from the rest of his literary contemporaries, however, is in his use of language. It is both gorgeous and original. He is able to paint an image of a common object in a way no one has before, and he does it over and again. Sometimes it is a stretch–but if the reader can forgive Hemon the occasional blunder, they will be amazed at his overall mastery of language.
It is interesting that Hemon himself learned English as an adult. He was visiting the US when civil war broke out in Bosnia. He picked up the language and began writing years later. In his writing, Hemon doesn't use the cliches that most writers repeatedly use as a crutch (perhaps unknowingly). He tears down the English language, and carefully, as if it were clay, reshapes it and molds into something that is quite the same, but entirely different.
Throughout this collection of short stories, I went back over many sentences, reread them and pondered their beauty. The stories weren't that memorable, neither were the characters, and soon I will forget them entirely. But those sentences–those extravagant sentences–they made reading the book well worth it.
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