"Love and Obstacles" by Aleksandar Hemon

************************************** 

On the surface, the nameless narrator of Hemon’s fourth book, an exquisite sequence of linked short stories, would seem to bear some resemblance to his creator. He is a young man from Sarajevo who aspires to write, and who must eventually endure a forced exile in Chicago when war breaks out in his homeland. To be sure, the Bosnian war is the seminal event at the heart of this collection, but the fact that the narrator is on another continent for its duration imbues it with a shadowy, mythic quality--real and unreal all at once.

 

These stories delineate a very clear arc, charting the narrator’s journey from innocence to experience, with all of the attendant heartbreak and disillusionment in between. When first we encounter him, in “Stairway to Heaven,” he is a teenager living in Zaire, where his father has been given a diplomatic posting. Bookish and uneasy with home life, he falls into the company of his neighbor, a shady American embassy worker called Spinelli, who introduces the narrator to the delights of drugs and rock-and-roll. The narrator still dreams, meanwhile, of Azra, the girl he has left behind in Sarajevo, but if what he feels for Azra can be called love, it is a boy’s conception of love--pure, hopeful, romantic, idealistic. Indeed, living in Kinshasa will allow him to “resist the torturous temptation and eschew the taint that the body inescapably inflicts upon the soul.” (This Descartian separation of body and soul will be forgotten soon enough; in the story “Everything,” the narrator imagines “a vast, wild territory of the purest sex, where the merest physical or eye contact led to copulation unbound.”)

 

The narrator soon falls for another girl, a blackjack dealer called Natalie whom he meets at a Kinshasa casino. To him, she is a heavenly being: “her pallor was luminous in the dark room ... [She] was from out of this world, a displaced angel.” With Natalie and Spinelli, the narrator escapes the confines of home and explores the urban jungle of Kinshasa. For the narrator, Spinelli is a liberating force, luring him away from a mundane existence. The drugs, booze, and Led Zeppelin records aside, Spinelli offers something the narrator’s father cannot: impossible tales of danger and intrigue--of dealing with mercenaries on the Congo, eluding a patrol of Cubans in Angola, engaging with a defector in South Africa. The narrator’s father, by contrast, as we later learn in “The Bees, Part 1,” has no patience for fiction and is committed only to truth (or what he perceives to be the truth). “He read the papers,” the narrator says of his father, “but found only the obituaries trustworthy.”

 

Spinelli’s influence on the narrator may liberate him, but it proves ultimately disastrous, and the story’s ending yields a wonderful moment, a heartbreaking epiphany, with the narrator finding Natalie transformed from angel to drug-addled whore. “Natalie lay on her side,” the narrator says, “her hand tucked between the pillow and her cheek, a tranquil smile on her face lit by the bedside lamp. Around her biceps, a loose rubber rope twisted. On the nightstand were a syringe and a spoon and a burning candle.” The romantic ideal has now been shattered (she has never been, of course, an angel), and the narrator flees into the night, beneath a “cataractous moon.” Hemon isn’t showing off when he uses such a phrase, with its whiff of Nabokov; just as the luminous moon above is clouded over and obscured, so too is his perception of the once-heavenly Natalie, who has been previously associated with images of light. And the narrator’s reluctant return to family life is equally blurred, as Hemon paints a desolate picture of Father, Mother, and Sister awaiting the prodigal boy’s return--an ironic portrait of familial bliss.

 

This pattern of breaking free from family life and returning disillusioned but wiser recurs throughout these stories. Just as the narrator comes home at the end of “Stairway to Heaven,” beaten down after a foray into the chaos of the outside world, so too does he return to his family in “Everything” and “American Commando.” Indeed, Hemon’s fiction portrays life as a series of departures and returns. This distancing from one’s roots is slow but inevitable, for the older one gets, the longer are the departures, until finally one’s connections with home are no more. In a touching moment in “American Commando,” the narrator, now a published writer, imagines the culmination of this journey: his parents’ death. “[E]ven though it had been long since they had protected me from anything,” he says, “I would be left alone and exposed to the world, devoid of home and love, left alone to confront all the people full of pain and anger.”

 

In some ways, then, we can understand the narrator’s migration to America as the most significant in a series of departures, the performance for which he has rehearsed all his life. His, however, is no ordinary tale of an immigrant making good. There is something sinister in the way the narrator exploits both his ethnicity and the war in Bosnia. He plays up, in other words, the role of suffering victim that he is expected to perform, as he admits in “Conductor”: “I was Bosnian, I looked and conducted myself like a Bosnian, and everyone was content to think that I was in constant, uninterrupted communication with the tormented soul of my homeland.”

 

In the marvelous story “Good Living”--almost Carveresque in its compression, bleakness, and sense of dark humor--the narrator goes door to door in a Chicago neighborhood selling magazine subscriptions, doing whatever he can to make a living. “I was desperate at the time,” he says, “what with the war and displacement, so I shamelessly exploited any smidgen of pity I could detect in lonely housewives and grumpy retirees whose doors I knocked at.” Entering one house, “a cavernous dark room reeking of overcurdled milk and beeswax tapers,” he finds a priest in a horrible state, drinking Scotch, in the midst of a domestic dispute with a young man who is presumably a lover. But the narrator has his eyes firmly trained on the priest’s wallet. There is no empathy here, no compassionate connection between two human beings (like there is at the end of “Conductor”), only a young man doing what he can to survive in an unforgiving world. So he takes advantage of the broken, vulnerable priest and sells him two subscriptions: if survival means preying on the weak, so be it. The narrator’s joyous response to his success suggests a darker, more Darwinian version of the American Dream--“I watched the flickering TV lights in the windows and the sparkling stars up in the sky, and I thought: I could live here. I could live here forever. This is a good place for me.”

 

******************************

 

Hemon’s stories are, among other things, about the nature of storytelling, about how we distinguish between the real and the unreal, between truth and lies, in our daily lives--and how easy it is to give in, at times, to the almost seductive lure of embellishment. Hemon’s storytellers are performers--whether in the guise of a two-bit huckster like Spinelli, or the Bosnian poet Muhammed D., in “Conductor,” who recites “in a susurrous voice, riding a tide of iambic throttles and weighted caesuras up to thunderous orgasmic heights, from where he returned to a whisper and then ceased altogether, his head bowed, his eyes closed.” Oral performance beguiles and enchants--no matter if the story being told bears little resemblance to the truth. The performance itself is a kind of truth, a version of the real.

 

For the narrator, stories make living in the real world bearable. In “American Commando,” he is interviewed by a young female Bosnian filmmaker hoping to elicit some commentary on identity, class conflict, and the war in Bosnia. Instead, the narrator recounts the story of another war--a battle over a playground waged between his gang of boyhood friends and a construction crew erecting a building, a story that grows more and more violent, more and more like a war. “But see, for us,” the narrator explains, “the war was elating, the freedom inherent in erasure, the absolute righteousness of our cause--we loved it all.” The story of this childhood turf war, exaggerated though it may be, replaces (or at least, suppresses) the real, more recent war, the earlier tale emerging in the narrator’s mind all the stronger, gaining importance, feeding his imagination.

 

The story from the past, then, allows him to cope with the unthinkable horrors of the present. When one’s reality consists of war, exile, and heartbreak, when one is adrift in a foreign land, longing for the smallest details from home--“the view from [a] window; the bell of the dawn streetcar; the smell of smog in February; the shape that the lips assume when people pronounce their soft Slavic consonants”--it’s the little stories one tells that allow a person to endure. After all, in Hemon’s fictional world, reality is often a theater of the absurd. Take the ending of “Everything.” After journeying to a distant town to purchase a freezer for the family, after getting teary-eyed drunk with a local and chasing after some girls, after attempting a liaison with a married American tourist and suffering terrible retribution, after seeing his spirits elevate to the skies and sink eventually into abject disillusion--after all this, Hemon writes: “When the war began in the spring of 1992, and electricity in the city of Sarajevo was cut, everything in the freezer chest thawed, rotted in less than a week, and then finally perished.”

 

Nothing could better underscore the pointlessness, almost, of living. What good is it to suffer such trials if, in the end, the freezer is going to break? What good is it being the greatest poet of Bosnia, like Muhammed D. in “Conductor,” if your fate is to die in a lonely hotel room, thousands of miles from your home? Moments like these give Hemon’s short stories a decidedly pessimistic tinge. In this way, however, they are more like real life than many optimists would care to admit.