Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel is immense. Not because it is inordinately long – it isn’t – but because it contains almost as much as its title promises: journeys that take years, and lives that span continents; falling empires and storied cities; so many wars they blur and merge in the characters’ memories; indelible loves, unbearable losses; dreams and songs and megalomaniac delusions; witty allusions, rude jokes. By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I’ll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year.
It begins in Sarajevo. Hemon, a Bosnian now living in the US, has written in several genres about the 1990s siege of that city. This book, though, takes us back to 1914, when it was the setting for the assassination that triggered the first world war. Our witness is Rafael Pinto: Sephardic-Jewish, Vienna-educated, pharmacist, homosexual, opium-user. As Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife drive into town, Pinto is in his shop, planting a kiss on the moustachioed lips of an Austrian Rittmeister. It’s an audacious act, but this is Sarajevo, a polyglot, multifaith city, and unorthodox conjunctions are worth daring. Until “the Holy One” – the being who “repeatedly creates worlds and destroys them” – puts an end to the world in which Pinto grew up and sends him off on foot all the way across the Eurasian landmass, eventually bringing him, 35 years later, to Shanghai, and to a plangent Liebestod.
