The Book of My Lives

In Sound and Vision, one of the autobiographical essays collected in The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon recalls a troubled holiday from his teenage years: en route from their native Sarajevo to the Congo, where his father works for the government, a series of mishaps strand the family Hemon in a seaside town in Italy, with no plane tickets and no money. Sasha and his sister mooch about the town, crack up over dubbed Italian TV and face imminent ruin with the helpless equanimity of teenagers. Eventually, Hemon's mother pawns some jewellery. There is ice cream. The family strolls along the seafront in a kind of truce. The children pool their part of the money from the jewellery to buy a cassette of David Bowie's Low; and, when the plane to Kinshasa is finally arranged, they sit suspended in a flaming sunset five miles above the earth, sharing a pair of cheap headphones, listening to the tape over and over until it wears out.

That's it. That's the whole essay. It's only a few pages long, told in the author's patented conversational tone - demotic, unshowy, a little journalistic - but it contains a whole world of Hemon: the simultaneous thrill and terror of dislocation, the glorious and usually trashy clash of cultures and languages, the exhilaration of precarious living. And that moment of miraculous suspension, thrown down at the end, almost negligently, as if it wasn't the most important thing.

Hemon's ability to communicate his enthusiasms - for Bowie, for dogs, for football, for Sarajevan architecture - is part of what makes this book of occasional pieces hang together so nicely. More than most essayists, he refuses to distinguish between the serious and the non-serious, and, perhaps uniquely, this refusal doesn't come across as a pose. In a literary culture that's frightfully anxious about sincerity, that tiptoes around it with mincing steps and venerates its successful performance, Hemon writes as if the problem hadn't even occurred to him.

There's plenty here to be serious about, of course. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo under Communism, witnessed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and saw his adored home city destroyed by war. By a fluke, he was in America when the siege began, and helplessly sat out the whole war as a displaced alien in Chicago - the city which he would adopt as his own, and to which he would apply his considerable love of place and talent for witnessing the urban scene. But the war seems to have made him as a writer. Much of his best writing focuses on the grimly bizarre, on absurd humour as the best way of understanding the senseless. So we have an account of Hemon as a pretentious young bohemian, throwing a raucous 'Nazi Party' (SS uniforms, mayonnaise swastikas on the salad), which got him and all his friends interrogated by the secret police; of his kindly Shakespeare professor who became the chief ideologue of Radovan Karadžić's genocide, and the gruesomely pathetic figure of Karadžić himself on the lam, reinvented as a new-age quack and reciting Serb epics in the bars of Belgrade; of the loneliness of immigrant life viewed through the prism of fanatical Sunday league soccer players and chess cafes; and of his own parents, relocated to Canada, finding ever newer and stranger ways of asserting their essential difference from the culture of their adopted country. Every piece here treads a fine ironic line between the hilarious and the horrifying, noting how they feed into each other: the girl who suggests the Nazi-themed party later becomes an actual fascist; the professor who shills for Karadžić does a famous interview for the BBC in which he insists that the shells raining down on Sarajevo in the background are fireworks with which the Serbs are celebrating Orthodox Christmas. Hemon knows the difference all too well between what's funny and what isn't funny, what deserves ironic distance and what simply needs to be told, but he also seems to know that this knowledge is hard earned and isn't given away easily.

The last essay in the book is 'The Aquarium', first published in The New Yorker. It deals with the serious illness of the author's baby daughter. It is not an easy read. Actually, it's staggeringly difficult, for reasons which need no elaboration here. More so than any other essay in this luminous book, it strips Hemon down to the core of what he is as a writer: a gifted communicator of experience who can bend his pen to anything experience might offer. Shakespeare and genocide, football and third-world exile, joke Nazis and real Nazis, the most unimaginable fears of a parent and David Bowie in the tropical clouds. It's all here.