PositiveThe London Review of BooksStories. True stories, false stories, good stories, rotten stories. Everything in Hemon’s beautiful new novel trembles within this matrix, where a story’s force or charm is at least as significant as its veracity ... Brik is a restless Bosnian immigrant in Chicago, dark with survivor guilt for having fortuitously missed the siege of his home town, Sarajevo: like Hemon himself... he[Brik] applies for a grant to research the 1908 murder of the Moldovan immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by Chicago’s chief of police ... it’s obvious from the start that this was a race killing, the dispatch of a suspicious-looking foreign ‘anarchist’ by a vicious cop answering to no one. It’s almost the only thing in the story that doesn’t cry out for examination.
Jonathan Bate
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat [Bate]'s written, capaciously, arrestingly, is a kind of tragedy. He glances at this word late in the book and distances himself from 'the vulgar sense' of it, but in the case of Hughes the word holds fast: Hamartia, the Aristotelian fatal flaw, is not so far off the mark. In the vulgar sense, tragedy befell others.
