Reviews

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

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wiffbiff's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

kerriboland's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

This book dragged for me. I had a hard time staying with Rafo and missed Osman as soon as he left. I recognize that Hemon followed a life and the multitude of wars it contained, but I feel like the book could have benefited from a shortening but a deepening of the its trajectory.

danata's review

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I was really excited that this book was partly in Ladino/Spanjol, the language of the Jews who got expelled from Spain in the 1490s. It's kind of like a medieval, oddly-spelled Spanish, and its speakers mostly diffused throughout the then-Ottoman-empire (Istanbul, Sarajevo, Salonica) and into Mexico and New Mexico (where a lot of "crypto-Jews" -- people who either disguised their identities or, after generations, forgot them, settled).

It make sense that that Hemon, who was forced into the life of a refugee when Sarajevo got besieged while he was overseas, would vibe with the Jews, who can feel semi-permanently not home. It also makes sense that he would be compelled to write this plot, about a sweet, inebriated Sarajevan Jew who gets knocked out of the Sarajevan carsija by war, and who -- like a good Bosnian -- falls into a cross-religion love affair.

I wasn't prepared, however, for the fact that Pinto, once leaving Sarajevo, would never go home again. The book takes us from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination straight to the bloody fields of Galicia, then by train to prisoner of war camps in Tashkent. Pinto is the narrator and he is not interested in any of the bird's eye political view of his situation, or even what you might write to your mom in a letter (Pinto fails to write his mom letters) -- so if you don't understand how he got into World War I, or who they were fighting, or what all the tumult is about when they reach Tashkent, or what's going on with the Great Game player they meet up with there -- well, you're going to stay ignorant.

While the text is beautiful and intimate and Pinto's love for Osman shines through it all, the rest feels like it's seen through a glass darkly. Together with the lack of driving plot -- TWAATIH is more of a chronicle than a set of rising actions -- the failure to ever orient towards the "larger focus" of what Pinto is living through started to make me feel frustrated and claustrophobic. I felt like I was seeing everything through multiple layers of gauze.

So, while I'm a big fan of Hemon's first book and I might come back to this later, I just don't have the steam for it during this dark February.

Content Warnings