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A review by poetic_liz
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon
I am not sure how to approach thus review the same way I wasn't sure how to approach the book.
This is a war story, a refugee story, and a ghost story. In being these things the book is ruthless, cold, devastating. I liked these aspects, liked that the author forced us through the trauma of war times in a way that I'm lucky enough to not understand. However, the mix of fiction and a very unreliable third-person narrator mixed with fictional non-fiction and a removed first person narrator made the book very bumpy and unnecessarily not fun in parts.
A big part of this book is the language of the characters, and while I appreciate the ideas and even the mix of languages, the author went too far, making the book near incomprehensible in parts (also at least some of the German dialogue was not fully correct either - if you commit to the bit of using up to five or more languages, get a proper proof read)
This book is both five stars (great writing in parts, amazing story, very touching and devastating), three stars (simply confusing writing & pacing - at some point being too fancy destroys readability), and two stars (there were parts I simply didn't enjoy, up to being annoyed).
I need to rethink this before putting numbers on this experience. Which in itself speaks for the book I think. The author mostly achieved what he wanted I believe, but he sacrificed readability for it & barely missed that line of crossing from "challenging fiction" to "pretentious, annoying" in parts. He is a great author, no doubt, and the book is *good* but I don't know whom I would recommend it to.
"History leaves devastation in its wake. You can experience and understand history only when you’re inside it, but when you’re inside it you don’t have time or gumption for understanding. All you want is just to stay alive, for which understanding is not necessary. You have no access to history’s complex, catastrophic logic, which is indelibly overwhelming and incomprehensible, particularly as you’re trying to survive. History has no limit in the exact same way my visual field has no limit, but the moment I write or speak about it, I place myself outside it, so it can only be experienced as a narrative."
This is a war story, a refugee story, and a ghost story. In being these things the book is ruthless, cold, devastating. I liked these aspects, liked that the author forced us through the trauma of war times in a way that I'm lucky enough to not understand. However, the mix of fiction and a very unreliable third-person narrator mixed with fictional non-fiction and a removed first person narrator made the book very bumpy and unnecessarily not fun in parts.
A big part of this book is the language of the characters, and while I appreciate the ideas and even the mix of languages, the author went too far, making the book near incomprehensible in parts (also at least some of the German dialogue was not fully correct either - if you commit to the bit of using up to five or more languages, get a proper proof read)
This book is both five stars (great writing in parts, amazing story, very touching and devastating), three stars (simply confusing writing & pacing - at some point being too fancy destroys readability), and two stars (there were parts I simply didn't enjoy, up to being annoyed).
I need to rethink this before putting numbers on this experience. Which in itself speaks for the book I think. The author mostly achieved what he wanted I believe, but he sacrificed readability for it & barely missed that line of crossing from "challenging fiction" to "pretentious, annoying" in parts. He is a great author, no doubt, and the book is *good* but I don't know whom I would recommend it to.
"History leaves devastation in its wake. You can experience and understand history only when you’re inside it, but when you’re inside it you don’t have time or gumption for understanding. All you want is just to stay alive, for which understanding is not necessary. You have no access to history’s complex, catastrophic logic, which is indelibly overwhelming and incomprehensible, particularly as you’re trying to survive. History has no limit in the exact same way my visual field has no limit, but the moment I write or speak about it, I place myself outside it, so it can only be experienced as a narrative."