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vermidian's review against another edition
2.0
If I could give half stars, I would probably give it 2.5 stars.
While the book is made up of separate stories, they all are stories about the same nameless character - a Sarajevan boy who emigrates to Chicago in his adulthood. Each story has it's own separate place in the young man's life, each on a different topic and scarcely referencing one another as if they were in different realities almost.
But I do have to say, all of these stories are like retellings of a bittersweet memory and I really don't care for the person the character is.
In the second story, he drunkenly follows women around a dark city at night in the hope of getting laid and hands a birth control pill to a married woman across the hall from his hotel room. As a woman, this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I'm not sure why he felt the need to record a story about this man doing this.
In the third story, where he's less of an awful person, it details the decline of a poet he didn't actually like much as a person or as an author but desperately wanted the approval of. When he didn't get that approval, he stopped writing poetry. Eventually the poet he respected deteriorates into drunken stupors and crazed madness, encouraged by the war that the character fled from before it began and used to his advantage in America.
In the fourth story, he's a magazine subscription salesman and he uses the anger and grief of an unhappy family to sell magazine subscriptions to a priest who's crying about the young man living with him.
In the fifth story, it really doesn't revolve around the main character of the other stories. Instead, it's told as a third person perspective story for the most part. His piece of shit poker buddy takes in a refugee of the war, treats him like shit, and the main character does nothing despite knowing how awful the man is that the refugee is living with. He doesn't even warn him. The story ends with the man being punched so hard his eye pops out of his socket.
In the sixth story, American Commando, he and his friends spend months hurling glass and molotv cocktails at construction workers because it's the only thing they can think of doing when their usual play spot is demolished and paved over for a construction site. Seriously, even children are more empathetic than this piece of shit main character and his war-like friends. I'm surprised they didn't end up in prison.
The fifth and seventh stories are the most bearable, but even so the character is self-absorbed and uninteresting. The stories are strange, dark, and meaningless to me. The nameless narrator is not a person I would ever want to be friends with. And, actually, all of the people that he had been friends with at some point seemed to be horrible people or authors who entirely ignore him as a person and as a professional (I don't blame them.).
I will say the vocabulary and the nostalgic but melancholy voice of the whole book made it an interesting read. It's almost haunting, in a way. But this is not a fun book. In fact, there is very little humor in it at all - no comic relief, no happiness, no joy. The voice of every story is that same weirdly sad memory of what once was for the narrator.
If these were meant to be joyful moments, I hope I never have to meet a man such as the narrator.
While the book is made up of separate stories, they all are stories about the same nameless character - a Sarajevan boy who emigrates to Chicago in his adulthood. Each story has it's own separate place in the young man's life, each on a different topic and scarcely referencing one another as if they were in different realities almost.
But I do have to say, all of these stories are like retellings of a bittersweet memory and I really don't care for the person the character is.
Spoiler
In the first story, he makes bad decisions and has poor taste in friends. He makes friends with an American man who's a drug addict and obviously up to all sorts of illegal shit in Africa. I know he's sixteen in the story, but we've all been sixteen and most of us, I'm pretty sure, have not made friends with drug-addicted illegal arms dealers.In the second story, he drunkenly follows women around a dark city at night in the hope of getting laid and hands a birth control pill to a married woman across the hall from his hotel room. As a woman, this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. I'm not sure why he felt the need to record a story about this man doing this.
In the third story, where he's less of an awful person, it details the decline of a poet he didn't actually like much as a person or as an author but desperately wanted the approval of. When he didn't get that approval, he stopped writing poetry. Eventually the poet he respected deteriorates into drunken stupors and crazed madness, encouraged by the war that the character fled from before it began and used to his advantage in America.
In the fourth story, he's a magazine subscription salesman and he uses the anger and grief of an unhappy family to sell magazine subscriptions to a priest who's crying about the young man living with him.
In the fifth story, it really doesn't revolve around the main character of the other stories. Instead, it's told as a third person perspective story for the most part. His piece of shit poker buddy takes in a refugee of the war, treats him like shit, and the main character does nothing despite knowing how awful the man is that the refugee is living with. He doesn't even warn him. The story ends with the man being punched so hard his eye pops out of his socket.
In the sixth story, American Commando, he and his friends spend months hurling glass and molotv cocktails at construction workers because it's the only thing they can think of doing when their usual play spot is demolished and paved over for a construction site. Seriously, even children are more empathetic than this piece of shit main character and his war-like friends. I'm surprised they didn't end up in prison.
The fifth and seventh stories are the most bearable, but even so the character is self-absorbed and uninteresting. The stories are strange, dark, and meaningless to me. The nameless narrator is not a person I would ever want to be friends with. And, actually, all of the people that he had been friends with at some point seemed to be horrible people or authors who entirely ignore him as a person and as a professional (I don't blame them.).
I will say the vocabulary and the nostalgic but melancholy voice of the whole book made it an interesting read. It's almost haunting, in a way. But this is not a fun book. In fact, there is very little humor in it at all - no comic relief, no happiness, no joy. The voice of every story is that same weirdly sad memory of what once was for the narrator.
If these were meant to be joyful moments, I hope I never have to meet a man such as the narrator.
melanie_reads's review against another edition
3.0
For a seemingly easy book of short stories, this is a difficult book. A series of inter conneceted stories across time and across the globe with a very big time marker - before the war in Bosnia-Sarajevo and the author's afterlife. Granted, maybe that break is exactly what Hemon is exposing. The utter incompatibility.
kylegarvey's review against another edition
4.0
Hemon's memoir-ish short stories have very few flaws -- they're all exciting and deeply-felt and very well expressed (even when that expression might have been hindered by the thesaurus-sounding vocabulary of a non-native speaker, the effect is quirky and cute more than anything else). Only, I wish he'd crafted this book as an actual memoir, or at least a novel, and not a collection of discrete stories. Some of them seem too samey -- wonderful on their own, but a little tiring together -- and his habit of basing stories on paraphrases of others' material, whether just a page or two or as the entire frame of the thing, might fit better in a longer work.
silvianotsylvia's review against another edition
5.0
I think this is by far the best thing I've read this year. It has been a while since I laughed out loud, cried, pondered upon things and remembered so many, all by reading a book. The entire book, all its stories were so authentic and raw and unexpected and yet familiar - an indescribable feeling that overwhelmed me and reminded me why I love to read short stories in the first place.
What I loved most and most - besides the relatable stories and an Eastern-European way of seeing life and fate and relationships - were the first and last stories: how they connected and how much humanity transpired out of them.
What I loved most and most - besides the relatable stories and an Eastern-European way of seeing life and fate and relationships - were the first and last stories: how they connected and how much humanity transpired out of them.
dfparizeau's review
3.0
I confess that I wasn't sure I would finish this collection when I first started reading it. I've mostly had my fill of the overtly unreliable narrator, but it is a testament to Hemon's prose, that he is able to write such compelling narratives, in a style and genre that has largely been done to death. This is more like 3.75/5 stars (I really wish GR would allow fractional ratings).
theoneana's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
sarahc3319's review against another edition
4.0
Reading Hemon makes my heart race and gives me an overwhelming sense of despair. Distilling his style into stories was almost unbearable-- in a good way. The talent pouring out of every sentence is palpable. This collection was breathtaking and wretched and painful and lovely.
hollowbook's review
4.0
I didn't absolutely love the first couple stories, but after that it was a non-stop safari through...uh...life, I guess. I haven't smiled or laughed openly so much because of a book in a long time. I wasn't a huge fan of the narrator of the stories, that is, I didn't much like him as a person, but I loved reading about his life and family and acquaintances (did he have any friends?). Good stuff. Really good stuff.
bowierowie's review against another edition
5.0
Oh, Aleksandar Hemon! the way you surprise me into fits of laughter while reading in awkward public places inspires me so. Enough said.
timshel's review against another edition
4.0
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.
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.