Speak, Memory

The true story of Aleksandar Hemon begins in a country that no longer exists.

It’s an ancient story: a young man examines his surroundings (in this case, late-1980s Yugoslavia), discovers influences (Conan the Barbarian, Sonic Youth, John le Carré, the Old Testament, Tolstoy), finds his voice (by writing stories, poems and essays about his hometown of Sarajevo) and leaves home.

It’s also a horror story of political turmoil, warfare and exile and, later, the loss of an infant daughter. As recounted in Hemon’s new memoir, The Book of My Lives, it’s at once unimaginable and unforgettable. And it ends–if the life story of a 48-year-old man safely ensconced in Chicago at the peak of his creative powers can be said to have ended–in a flurry of international acclaim. Hemon has published two story collections (2000’s The Question of Bruno and 2009’s Love and Obstacles), a novel (2002’s Nowhere Man) and a spellbinding, sort-of fictional sort-of biography (2008’s The Lazarus Project), along the way picking up a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur “genius” grant and many other honors. With Hemon, says the writer Jonathan Lethem, “above all and no matter the topic or register, it’s the voice–that glowering intelligence pulsing behind a truly glittering surface.”

All along, he has told stories that cross–and erase and evade–the borders between fact and fiction. He tells complicated stories in complicated ways, because the world is complicated. Even his memoir is most devastatingly true when it asserts the vitality and succor of invention. Sometimes one has to make things up to make sense of it all. Hemon has mastered this.

“He’s the only Eastern European writer I know for whom the Conrad comparisons make sense,” says the novelist Gary Shteyngart. “His ability to inhabit both worlds, Bosnia and the Midwest, requires a different kind of brain.”

Like Joseph Conrad before him, Hemon writes in a language he learned as an adult; it has been 20 years since he wrote his first story in English. Growing up in Sarajevo, he watched the socialist dream descend into fascism with the rise of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. As an ambitious young punk who played in rock bands and wrote for the local alternative paper, Hemon began deejaying at a radio station. “I sent signals by playing songs,” he says with a laugh over a shrimp po’ boy, rice and beans at an ersatz-Southern restaurant in Chicago on a snowy day in early March. “I’d put on the MC5’s ‘Kick Out the Jams,’ trying to stoke a revolution.”

He didn’t. “Almost all the people I knew, even some of my friends, easily converted to fascism,” he says. “Culture is not necessarily ennobling. You can formulate your ethics by engaging with culture, but you can also find your ethics by staring at the f—ing wall.”

Hemon did a little of both. The year before the siege of Sarajevo, he escaped to his family’s mountain cabin with only a radio and stacks of books to read “before the war consigned everything and all to death and oblivion,” as he later wrote in Granta. With only jazz, wood chopping and the family dog as distractions, he experienced “a kind of hypersensitive exaltation that allowed me to average four hundred pages a day,” he writes in The Book of My Lives. “The book would become a vast, intricate space in my head, and I couldn’t leave it, not when I ate, not when I hiked, not when I slept–I lived inside it.”

It took a propaganda unit to break him out of this space. The now defunct U.S. Information Agency invited the young Bosnian writer on a monthlong tour of America, where he learned enough English to get by. “I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1, 1992,” he says. “It would have put me in Sarajevo on May 2.” On that day, Bosnian Serb forces completed the total blockade of Sarajevo.

His parents fled the city for his grandparents’ rural house; they eventually emigrated to Canada, where his father, a former engineer, found work at a steel mill, and his mother, a former accountant, became a building superintendent. Hemon, then 27, was stranded in Chicago. (He wouldn’t return to Bosnia for five years.) With his money and prospects quickly dwindling, he found an expat community, scrounged for work and bounced around a series of abject apartments, all while navigating the space between immigration and integration.

“I busied myself comparing how you Americans do things to how my friends and parents did,” he says. “And then I had a revelation: Miles Davis was American–not in the sense of patriotism but that he re-created the ultimate American music idiom. I had been arguing with abstractions, with collective and individual essences. But someone like Miles could never be reduced to that. He was sovereign.”

Hemon decided that instead of just consuming culture, he would create it. His memories, struggles and encounters became stories in English. By decade’s end, he’d generated enough to compile The Question of Bruno, which introduced Hemon’s bumbling quasi-doppelgänger, the Bosnian refugee Jozef Pronek. Pronek’s adventures continued in 2002’s dazzling hall-of-mirrors novel Nowhere Man, which begins as the coming-of-age story of a Bosnian immigrant in Chicago and ends up something else entirely, told in a virtuosic polyphony and ranging over Harbin, China; Shanghai; Sarajevo; Kiev, Ukraine; and Chicago.

The Lazarus Project focused on another immigrant in contemporary Chicago, Vladimir Brik, who becomes obsessed with the true-life story of Lazarus Averbuch, who was shot to death in 1908 at the home of the Chicago chief of police. As Brik’s and Averbuch’s destinies intertwine, the book’s pages turn up images of Averbuch alongside photographs by Hemon’s lifelong friend, the Montreal-based photographer Velibor Bozovic. It’s perhaps implied that Bozovic’s black-and-white images, taken across Eastern Europe, are meant to represent Brik’s point of view: eerie, untethered, uncaptioned, maybe untrustworthy.

“He searches for historical facts in fictional narratives,” says the writer T Cooper, whose novel Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes explores some of the same terrain as that of Hemon’s books–immigration, adaptation and the slipperiness of factual truth. “He understands that historical ‘facts’ are full of some of the greatest fictions of all time.”

Since the Lazarus project received universal renown five years ago, Hemon’s worlds have multiplied and contracted. He divorced his first wife and married Teri Boyd, a photo editor, with whom he had two daughters, Ella and Isabel. He and Boyd began hosting a literary salon–first at their house, then at a bar–which became “the glue of the Chicago artistic scene,” as Hemon’s neighbor, writer Rebecca Makkai, describes it.

“I’m always mildly dissatisfied with where I live, looking for the next place,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning, Chicago-based author Jeffrey Eugenides. “But Chicago is it for him. He’s always going on about his butcher and his mechanic and his dry cleaner and how he never wants to leave them. He has a very intimate relationship with his butcher, like what a New Yorker might have with a shrink.”

But in 2010, Hemon’s carefully constructed world collapsed. In “The Aquarium,” collected in The Book of My Lives, he recounts the death of 10-month-old Isabel, who is diagnosed with and succumbs to a rare form of pediatric cancer. The elegy is walled in by data: lists of times and dates, procedural details, pharmaceutical names. The simplicity is heartbreaking.

“It’s very difficult to fictionalize intensely emotional stuff,” he says, “because it might be a violation of other people’s sorrow.” This is why, despite his propensity for blending fact and fiction, this one story required a memoir to tell it. Parts of The Book of My Lives recount the actual incidents fictionalized in his novels and stories, but it’s “The Aquarium” that probes deep into Hemon’s urge to obfuscate. Before Isabel’s death, he writes, “I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives.” Afterward, “we had to live inside a void that could be filled only by Isabel’s presence. Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.”

And yet, even at this moment of ultimate loss, storytelling holds fast. His older daughter Ella, longing for her sister to come back, invents a new sibling. Her fictional brother Mingus concludes the story, building a family of his own and traveling through a world of Ella’s creation.

Ella’s instinct was, Hemon says, “a kind of revelation. I saw how she processed this and I thought, That’s what I do. The whole character of my personal sovereignty was formulated through the act of storytelling. This engagement is a way to keep things real.” He laughs in amazement. “Do you know what I mean? As long as we’re trying to imagine someone else’s life, someone else’s spirit, we are all connected.”