In 1992, Aleksandar Hemon was visiting Chicago when war broke out in his home country of Bosnia. Chicago became his adopted home, and he soon became a highly praised writer of fiction. In 2004, he received a MacArthur “genius grant.†Mr. Hemon’s new book, “The Book of My Lives,†collects nonfiction pieces about his upbringing in Sarajevo and his life in America. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Hemon discussed displacement, visiting Sarajevo now, the purpose of art and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You write in the book’s opening that you “have to be pressed into writing nonfiction.†Why is that
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation. So even if there is a true story I am tempted to tell, I wait to see what it becomes after months and, often years, of being pickled in my brain. Several pieces from the book were commissioned after I told the story to an editor.
More than 20 years after moving to Chicago, do you feel like someone with two homes or do you still feel like someone displaced
I have two homes like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they’re going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
You write that “normal life†wasn’t really available to your parents when they moved to Canada, “despite all the integrationist promises.†Did you, or do you, feel the same way about America
Displacement pretty much excludes what my parents and many Sarajevans call “normal life,†which is in many ways a nostalgic concept. I stopped pining for normal life a while ago. I’ll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability â€" the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
You say that after the war, you “excised and exterminated that precious, youthful part of me that had believed you could retreat from history and hide from evil in the comforts of art.†Does art serve a different purpose for you now Can you articulate what it is
It is establishing a space for continuous dialogue. In that space our experience is deposited and recreated by storytelling or poetry so that we can fully confront it. We ought to be more lucid there, rather than tranquilized.
When was the last time you were in Sarajevo What is it like for you when you visit now
A couple of years ago. Last year was the first year since 1997 that I didn’t go. Most of the time when I go back I see my many friends, so it gets intense. A lot of late nights and stories. Sometimes I go to Sarajevo to work. Last time I was there, I spent 10 days working with my friend Jasmila Zbanic on a script. We were locked up in an office 10 to 12 hours a day.
Velibor BozÌŒovicÌ Aleksandar HemonIn the book, you say: “I feel I am a writer only at the time of writing.†What do you feel you are the rest of the time
Father, friend, soccer player, author. I think that being a writer is my vocation â€" in the original sense of the word: I was called upon to write. But not to tour or give interviews. That is external to writing and certainly not essential. If I stopped doing all that, I’d still be a writer. Perhaps even more so.
You enjoy soccer and skiing because they allow participants to “make decisions by improvising inside a vanishing moment.†Do you find a parallel sensation in the act of writing
Part of the writing process I experience as something similar to going downhill at great speed, recognizing all the possibilities inherent in the momentary set of circumstances and making decisions rapidly. That is most exhilarating. But then I edit, which is when the analytical, strategic part of the mind is engaged. That is exhilarating to me as well.
You famously learned to read and write English by reading Nabokov. Were there other writers who had a strong influence on your initial efforts with the language
I read a lot of Nabokov, but not exclusively Nabokov. Also, what I was trying to acquire was the English with which I could write. I already had enough conversational English, but that was not helping me with writing. I thought that writing English (as it were) should be acquired by reading, so I read a lot and eventually went to grad school so that I could read all day long. I read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, a lot of English and American poetry, then I reread a lot of books I had read before in my native language: Chekhov, Kafka, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.
In the midst of the devastation of the final essay, about the death of your young daughter Isabel, there are some very moving descriptions of your older daughter Ella’s imagination. Do you see a writer in Ella Do you talk to her or teach her explicitly about storytelling
I don’t coach her â€" not even while she plays soccer. We just let her pursue all kinds of interests. That is largely because she is a fantastically curious child. But even if I had hope or expectations for her to be a writer, I think that to be a writer one should not focus on the tricks or skill of writing. She would benefit far more from pursuing her curiosity wherever it takes her, becoming a dilettante, like her father, who knows a little bit about everything but not much about anything. Expertise is the enemy of imagination. I avoid expertise like the plague.
Are you able to share details of any fiction you might be working on at the moment
Alas, no. Not because it is a secret, but because it is still fragile, and a stranger’s breath might make it go down like a toothpick Eiffel Tower.
