Book review: A riveting tale of survival amid war in The World and All That It Holds
Archduke Franz Ferdinand: the assassination that started the First World War sparks the events of 'The World and All That It Holds'
- The World and All That It Holds
- Alexandar Hemon
- Picador, €26.99
‘I live for tales of displacement and oblivion,’ so says an unnamed writer towards the end of . If this is not Bosnian-American author Alexandar Hemon himself, it’s certainly a stand in for him. He arrived in Chicago in 1992 as a journalist. When Serbian forces invaded Sarajevo, he was exiled and didn’t see his home again until after the war.
His previous novels, (2002) and (2008) focused on untold stories of refugees and migrants. In this immense novel, he takes us back to 1914 Sarajevo, a city forever on a fault line of history, and the story of two Bosnian conscripts unmoored by war or a merciless god hell-bent on creating worlds only to destroy them.
It opens with Sephardic Jew and pharmacist Rafael Pinto self-medicating in his apothecary, contemplating the Holy One and Genesis of the world, and avoiding the crowds gathered outside to witness the passing cavalcade of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Viennese educated, a poet and homosexual, if Pinto is concerned about societal strictures, it’s nothing a little self-medication can’t take care of.
In his laudanum haze he kisses an Austrian Rittmeister and he pursues him out into the celebrations, only to witness instead the assassination of the Archduke and his wife. Within weeks, his libertine life is over. If he’d thought God was content to settle on this world, he will bear witness to a cataclysmic cycle of destruction spanning decades.
The novel poses the question, when the entire world is in convulsion, how or why do you keep living? For Pinto, it is his fellow Bosnia Osman, a Muslim soldier.
Hemon spent 12 years writing this book, and throughout he never averts his gaze from the wholesale horror of warfare; the mud, death and stench of the trenches. Osman, handsome and funny, stands out against all the relentless destruction. He tells stories to give some respite to his fellow soldiers. He is the light to extinguish ‘la gran eskuridad’, or darkness that overwhelms Pinto. He woods Pinto and they fall in love. Oman says he will always be with Pinto and in a sense that’s true.
Together they are set adrift across continents for decades. They survive cholera, and the Brusilov Offensive, only to be captured by the Russians and sent thousands of miles away to a prisoner of war camp in Tashkent, Central Asia. They save each other time and again. When the war ends, they live among Bolsheviks and spies, where Osman is allowed keep his secrets as he seeks a way back home. In attempting to extricate British spy Major Moser Ethering, Osman rides away and never comes back.
This disappearance is foreshadowed a number of times with unexplained absences of the enigmatic Muslim where each time he becomes a voice in Pinto’s head. The final time, he asserts himself as a ghost who travels with Pinto and a baby girl, who we are told is Osman’s by birth. The three continue across deserts and over mountains forever at the mercy of whatever god, demon or warlord resides in the particular landscape. An Estonia Baron fighting Bolsheviks in the Taklamakan gives a nod to Eastern philosophy, ‘people think that God should love them. But why bother with a loving god? A weak god loves. A strong god kills, destroys and remakes.’
Other voices enter the narrative, including the aforementioned ‘writer’, who inserts his research in the form of the fictional memoirs of Moser Etherings. At these points the reader becomes removed from the more embodied parts of the story. It’s Pinto’s multilingual narrative that is the most compelling and holds the book together, where English is interspersed with phrases of Bosnia, German and Spanjol (local Spanish). ‘His mind infested with all the languages’ gives us a narrator who weaves myths, poetry, philosophy into this tale of enduring love, first for Osman and later for his daughter. If you let the other languages wash over you, the meaning is clear in the telling.
is an audacious and beautiful epic that will at times break your heart. To be a forgotten captive of history, to be in the world without papers naming where you belong, is a brutal endurance test. Alexandar Hemon provides a timely reminder of the humanity and circumstances attached to every displaced person and the indifference and oblivion on the gods looking on.
