Writers & Readers Week
Mar 15 | Reviewed by Tom Fitzsimons

IT’S A wonderful and almost relieving thing to read someone who’s completely in command of a language. It’s better still when they do it without ostentation, peppered with humour and verve. When you find out it’s not even their first language, well, it’s just damned frustrating for an aspiring writer.

A Sarajevan by birth, American by circumstance, and all sorts of other things besides, Aleksandar Hemon is such a writer, and thus a very welcome member of this year’s Writers & Readers line-up. I was looking forward to hearing him.

Unforgivably, Hemon’s initial reading from his novel, Nowhere Man, was marred by a sound problem that left a shrill hum ringing in our ears. A couple of people walked out and I really couldn’t concentrate.

Thankfully, by the time he got back to the little red chair, the noise was at least somewhat muted. The conversation that followed between Hemon and local publisher Fergus Barrowman was substantial and satisfying. Hemon appeared relaxed but still completely involved, talking articulately through a range of topics.

First, we had him rejecting the idea that writers have to be ‘authentic’ recorders of events. Hemon has written predominantly in the shadow of the bloody events after the break-up of Yugoslavia, and this position might seem surprising. Yet he disavowed notions of strong ethnic identity, calling them ‘one of the great lies of the twentieth century’. He said he believes his life is not particularly special or interesting, and that it might only become so through the ‘transformative’ power of literature.

This is not to say he strives for big, sledgehammer ideas in his work. He argued that the edifice of a fictional world crumbles away if an ‘idea’ is arrived at too quickly, that they can only ‘loom on the horizon’ and be derived from the substance of a work.

That substance, according to Hemon, is the creation of intuitive, believable characters. He said he avoids especially any version of writing that focuses on supposed ‘great men’, talking of his disdain for leaders from Slobodan Milosevic to George Bush who take ‘messianic approaches to transforming the world’. Rather, the best literature is made of ‘the multitude of tiny details of each human life’. He said his ultimate goal was to love his characters, in spite of all their flaws, and thus find some ‘love for humanity’.

I liked all of this and found it thoroughly uplifting, but I realise some people might have thought it a bit wet. That’s not really fair, though, when you consider either Hemon’s background or his work. The background, just to be clear, is that of a man who left Sarajevo by chance in 1992, a month before the four-year siege began that would kill 12,000 people. The work is a response to those events – and the real lives inside it – that manages to be dark, wickedly funny and utterly inventive all at once. Hardly sentimental.

Hemon described himself as a ‘survivalist’, who could both savour the here-and-now, and laugh about the past. So he told us, after a Zen Buddhist parable, that he ‘would live through hell to eat a strawberry’ and that ‘if you can tell [a tragic story] in a funny way, then you can survive’. This bittersweet mix is such a hallmark of his prose that it was illuminating to hear the thought process behind it.

Finally, Hemon spoke of language. ‘Language is so real to me I sometimes feel I can touch the sounds’, he said. He shied away from associating his innovative quality with coming to English late (like Conrad and any number of other top writers), saying he felt he toyed with language similarly in his native Bosnian.

If you haven’t read any Hemon, pick up one of his books just for this. It isn’t any writer who can turn an ordinary sky into a ‘yolky sun’ threatened by clouds of ‘dark wool’. Full of imagery, and narrative fragments, and characters that move and kick, they’re well worthy of your time.

» Aleksandar Hemon @ NZ International Arts Festival