The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God — or Aleksandar Hemon. But this Bosnian American author will make you a believer ... Charismatic ... Sounds awfully grim, I know, and there’s plenty of horror in these fiery pages, but the irrepressible voice of The World and All That It Holds glides along a cushion of poignancy buoyed by wry humor. From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love ... [An] epic ... The plot’s inexhaustible invention is just one of this novel’s wonders. The other is Hemon’s mysterious narrator. He speaks from the future but resides incarnate in these characters ... The real miracle of The World and All That It Holds is that despite holding so much, we come to know the fragile joys of this one melancholy man so well that he feels written into our own past.
Unlike-any-novel-I’ve-read-before ... I have puzzled over how vividly it remains with me — I keep reentering this world, its sensory intensity more palpable than many memories of my own life. The novel’s ability to perpetuate itself seems to me to come both from the fantastic virtuosity of the writing and from the wonderfully realized idea of the book ... The clear story lines of fable — flight, romance, battle scene, epic journey, retrospect — are throughlines around which reverberate the propulsive and complicated sentences Hemon writes ... The World and All That It Holds makes one bold innovative move after another, rapidly changing perspectives, leaping forward with the flexibility of the splendid narrative voice, bringing in powerful characters ... The astonishment of this novel is that it creates that movement in time. In The World and All That It Holds, we do remember that future, and all the futures it entails.
In this novel idyll and ordeal are not stable categories, but slide past each other ... Some of the lovers’ words and phrases can feel like approximations, hitting false notes ... There is also an epilogue written in the same first-person voice, recounting the author-figure’s meeting in Jerusalem in 2001 with the 'real' Rahela Pinto, who supposedly inspired the character. Postmodernism has made readers wary of any such claims of historical veracity, and in any case stories win us over with their fruits and flowers, not with their roots. We believe in Pinto’s experiences not because there may have been a person by that name, but thanks to the fierceness of the details.
At first appears to confirm Hemon as a purveyor of plurality and a Kišian refusenik ... As in much of Hemon’s earlier work, the narrator is reconstructing the past at a time close to the present day ... Hemon hints throughout that there is something curious about the account we’re reading. He refuses to say who the narrator is or how he came to be interested in Pinto’s story. We have to wait until the end for an explanation ... I won’t spoil the ending, but for all the build-up it doesn’t deliver a last-act thrill; rather, postponing the fact has the effect of preventing us from relaxing into the fiction, without the compensations of scepticism and irony afforded by the earlier books ... Aleksandar Hemon isn’t the writer he once was, and his efforts to conceal it are fooling no one.
His most ambitious work ... The problem is that his transparent desire to paint his masterpiece results too often in a self-conscious striving for effect and an unwavering commitment to solemnity. Anybody who comes to the book without having read his earlier ones might be surprised to hear that Hemon can be a playful, funny writer. Here, such comedy as there is proves largely inadvertent ... Achingly responsible ... Even at times of genuine excitement, Hemon keeps pausing the action for grand-sounding pronouncements that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
An endearing journey of romance, time, faith, human migration, war, resilience, ever-enduring hope, addiction, tragedy and a love that is unconditional and seemingly bound eternal through nearly a hundred years of lived experiences ... Hemon’s writing is both gripping and lucid. He creates this work around such meticulous texture that the reader can stand alongside Pinto, and feel the cities as if they were with him ... This story is interrupted, rather abruptly at times, by interjections of Hemon’s personal foray into the research for some of his characters and the reality of the events that surround the fictionalized aspects of his narrative. It became apparent throughout this book that some of the characters you are reading about are based on real people, whose existences serve as the template to his story and are revealed more fully through a rather honest and forthright epilogue. These brief interjections were a bit distracting, as they obstructed the book’s pace and otherwise marvelous storytelling.
Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel is immense. Not because it is inordinately long – it isn’t – but because it contains almost as much as its title promises: journeys that take years, and lives that span continents ... By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I’ll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year ... I didn’t like this ending. It is a little pat, a little too modishly autofictional. But my unhappiness with it is a compliment to Hemon. The historical-fictional illusion he has created is so engrossing, so generous in the abundant pleasures it offers the reader, that being yanked out of it cannot but hurt.
[Harmon's] best yet, which isn’t to say that it’s perfect ... The pages are scattered with polyglot phrases and textural details, all of which add verisimilitude, but become confusing and make the book wobble under the weight of its ambition ... With a destination as satisfying as Hemon gives us, we can allow the bumps along the road.
There’s something majestic about The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel ... Not surprisingly, given its ambition, the novel took Hemon 12 years to complete ... The passages depicting bloodshed are so relentless on occasion I had to pause reading. But the brutality of conflict and displacement is beautifully contrasted with the tenderness of the men’s love story ... In his acknowledgments, Hemon mentions Damir Imamović’s album, a contemporary take on Bosnian traditional music inspired by The World and All That It Holds. He calls it 'an outrageous masterpiece', and I couldn’t think of a more fitting description for Hemon’s own work.
At first, things look promising. There is a terrific opening set piece ... From here, though, it’s downhill all the way to Shanghai, where the story ends 300 pages later, in 1949 ... The idea, presumably, was to sketch a grand transcontinental frieze while illustrating the random cruelties of history and the triumph of love. Instead, we have a rambling travel narrative, lacking plot, structure and tension ... In this particular novel, expect fusty archaisms... faux-profundities... clichéd imagery ... plain missteps... and cheesy dialogue ... Occasional semi-successes... only throw the rest of the prose into unflattering relief. And then there are the repetitions. Not only does Hemon repeatedly reuse content, he also recycles the same weak imagery ... A rag-bag of narrative scraps, recorded continuously and read in Hemon’s mumble-voice.
Hemon, always electrifying, returns to fiction...plunging readers into the horrors and grim absurdities of war in prose molten with caustic irony, furious wit, bitter rage, and transcendent beauty ... Hemon’s unflinching, riveting, funny, worldly-wise, and soulful magnum opus wrestles with humanity’s shocking depravity and incandescent courage and love.
Ambitious, elegantly wrought ... Hemon’s ability to pack such an epic narrative into 352 pages is impressive. Across all its settings, the tale is enriched by the accumulation of closely observed details. Vivid action sequences are neatly balanced with scenes exploring the characters’ interior lives ... Quietly passionate.
The problem is that his transparent desire to paint his masterpiece results too often in a self-conscious striving for effect and an unwavering commitment to solemnity ... Almost achingly responsible ... Hemon scrupulously acknowledged his "stage fright" at the "cultural appropriation" involved in imagining "a consciousness from 1914 by a queer man," before he decided, "Fuck it. Let’s do it." The trouble is that the initial nervousness doesn’t seem to have quite gone away, and he never really does fuck it, instead handling the relationship with a level of anxious piety that often curdles into sentimentality ... Even at times of genuine excitement, Hemon keeps pausing the action for grand-sounding pronouncements that don’t stand up to scrutiny ... The novel is often successful as an adventure yarn, even if it would work better without the constant editorializing ... His sympathy with people caught up in history can be highly affecting, and there’s no denying the emotional punch of the book’s climax.
Epic ... The writing remains powerful, beautiful, and the epilogue provides an origin story that puts everything that has preceded it in fresh light ... Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.
Potent ... Hemon easily immerses readers in the characters’ various languages, particularly the Sarajevo 'Spanjol' dialect, and brings home via vivid daydreams Pinto’s anguish while separated from Osman. Readers will delight in this sweeping epic.
