The Question of Bruno

Reviews

“Entertaining stories about Sarajevo? Weirdly droll and heartbreaking, this debut volume deftly anatomizes a world gone wrong.”

“The Yugoslavian-born author came to the United States on vacation but was forced to stay when his country erupted in war. In this collection of stories, political reality is driven into everyday life like a wedge or—just as often—a knife. The most straightforward pieces benefit immensely from the fact that English is not Hemon’s native language. Like Conrad’s, his prose often makes the most of emphatically discordant notes: an initially incongruous word comes to seem a perfect choice.”

“So good as to make the reader feel certain of having discovered not just an extraordinary story but an extraordinary writer: one who seems not simply gifted but necessary.”

“The man is a maestro…As vivid a prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.”

“An inventive and thorny collection of interlocking narratives that has the jarring immediacy of autobiography, as if Hemon were brandishing a handheld video camera at the inchoate episodes of his life. But his artful anarchic jump-cutting is firmly grounded by the undeniable heft of history…Whether pondering the coldblooded craft of Sarajevo’s snipers or offering a Proustian joke, Hemon has an impeccable ear for the mundane ironies and bleak compromises elicited by extraordinary events.”

“That eerie half-world in which small personal dramas play out against shattering current events is the territory of Aleksandar Hemon’s assured first short-story collection, The Question of Bruno—a debut all the more impressive because the author, a native of Sarajevo, only recently learned English. Before the comparisons to Nabokov and Conrad start coming, however (and odds are they’ll come fast and furious), know this: Hemon is an original voice, and he has imagination and talent all his own…[Grade:] A.”

“It is surely no coincidence that the name of Joseph Conrad, another European exile whose native language is not English, is alluded to several times in Hemon’s often thrilling debut collection, The Question of Bruno. There could hardly be a better ancestor-mentor invoked. Hemon’s memoir-like stories and one novella here tell us much about the horrors of war, the confusions of identity, and the no-less-perplexing business of creating a new life in a country not your own.”

“Like Nabokov, Hemon writes with the startling peeled vision of the outsider, weighing words as if for the first time; he shares with Kundera an ability to find grace and humor in the bleakest of circumstances. In part his book is a history lesson, but it is history felt on a human pulse. He imagines his way back into the troubled soul of his home city and tells its tales from within.”

“By turns terrifying, gently comic, and brutally satiric, these are stunning stories that compel the reader to view a world rendered…abruptly alien and unfamiliar.”

“The book’s language is rich, complex, sharply intelligent, and frequently funny—a pleasant surprise for readers of new fiction, and all the more astonishing considering Hemon wrote it in English, his second language.”

“Expertly wrought…Generously endowed with pathos, humor, and irony, and written in an off-balance, intoxicating English, this collection announces a talent reminiscent of the young Josef Skvorecky.”

“Hemon’s writing is sensible, with a hint of satire, and is heavily based on wistful description rather than farfetched dialogue…This is the work of a rare talent who deserves our attention.”

“The exile’s wrenching experiences of learning a new language and culture infuse his edgy stories with a hallucinatory intensity. Hemon handles English as though each sentence were an incendiary device, beautifully made but volatile; and each tale, loaded with painful memories and scouring observations, is an ambush on an elusive enemy…Fascinated with the meeting of memory and language, adept at conjuring states of mind, and haunted by the violence wracking his homeland, Hemon is a stoic tragedian and a brilliant satirist.”

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