... autobiographical without ever seeming confessional or succumbing to the egocentrism of so much autofiction ... Though it deals with tragedy, My Heart is never depressing, partly because of the beauty of the language—expertly translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth—and partly because of its depth and honesty of emotion, its intelligence and generosity of spirit, and the precision and originality of Mehmedinovic’s observations ... powerful, at once profound and charming[.]
When a writer works from the heart, he or she invites readers into a communion. In the autobiographical novel My Heart, the Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinović offers us an opportunity for fellowship with his beloved family. He works within his text like a stonemason, assembling small narrative fragments into cairns that outline a heartfelt landscape ... With masterful craft, Mehmedinović assembles his mosaic, tight enough to tell the tales yet loose enough to contain the diversity of his thought ... His descriptions of the love shared between husband and wife are profound ... Too often, we are glib about the power of love. We want to think of it as a romantic notion of idyll and pleasure. In the abstract, it is an easy thing to honor. Mehmedinović brings us back to Earth, reminding us that it’s not ethereal; love is an essential element of the life system.
The overall effect is of a camera sharpening: the background noise gives way to a crisp foreground, the local details of love and relationships ... This slight yet major existential novel...is itself a kind of letter, a record of subtle, intimate moments ... Mehmedinović writes with the freedom of a person who assumes he won’t be read widely. Loosely he threads scenes, sometimes embellishing them with his own scribbly illustrations, which are included without preamble or justification. It feels, in other words, like a genuine piece of art, not a product to be capitalized on ... My Heart deserves to be read widely, and closely. Each sentence is smooth and precise, cerebral but never grandiose. In Mehmedinović’s novel, life and death emerge most vibrantly alongside one another.
... includes the mundane and the astonishing ... The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once observed that "There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.' As we can see from My Heart, this is also how the warmth gets out.
The misfortunes are palpable, especially the loss of homeland and native language ... My Heart offers a tragic vision, inherently and warily European. Mehmedinović’s mordancy punctures the illusions of his country of exile without naming them, and refuses (or isn’t inclined by temperament) to critique them prescriptively. The melancholic embrace of unfulfillment is heard ... Obsessed with the burst and fading of memory, Mehmedinović watches for evidence that his internal impulses still pertain in an frightening world. There is discovery in this effort— even if 'every word of this diary will be forgotten.'
Semezdin Mehmedinović’s autobiographical novel...manages to imprint something like the heart onto the page, something beating, aching, pulsing ... Mehmedinović’s prose is full of detours...into tiny details of memory ... Many autobiographical novels try to tell you something about life. Mehmedinović’s prose feels more like life itself on the page. It is filled with the busy, daily matter of living, which Mehmedinović recounts in vivid, color-filled prose.
Mehmedinović switches back and forward between the years of his exile in Washington D.C. (where he also worked as journalist) and his life back in Sarajevo during and before the war. He has that unique talent of swinging harmoniously between those worlds permeated by pain and melancholy. It is a pleasure to discover his brilliant thoughts in every attempt to comprehend and amalgamate that capsized and ruptured world in the same paragraph. My Heart is an engaging journey that transverses uncountable topics, and one would relate to Mehmedinović’s experience in every sentence. That is the essence of his writing ... He possesses that rare and most appreciated quality of conveying a deep serenity to the reader ... a truly universal book that would connect us to the most intimate part of our own hearts and brains.
It is a testament to Semezdin Mehmedinović’s writing that an autobiographical novel composed of such melancholic fragments is heartbreaking without ever being bleak ... a refugee success story by any account, but My Heart reveals the small fears and losses that thread through a life in exile ... Celia Hawkesworth’s English translation beautifully renders Mehmedinović’s limpid style. This is unpretentious writing that offers small flashes of an ordinary life with a healthy sense of their inanity.
... offer[s] sweeping novelistic views of the simplest and yet most complex of organisms: the human family ... capture[s] the bizarreness of these deeply knitted groups, warm to one another yet closed to outsiders.
Notable Bosnian poet Mehmedinović writes in first person in this autobiographical novel that explores themes of survival, perseverance, and love, ultimately conveying an intimate, yet profound and lyrical portrait of a man and his family. Each of the novel’s three parts is a soulful reverie that opens with the narrator, nicknamed Me’med, describing an unforgettable physical experience that then serves as a catalyst for deep, internal reflection ... an introspective, literary journey worth taking.
Bosnian writer Mehmedinović returns with a powerful autofictional gut punch of a novel ... In an introduction, Aleksandar Hemon calls Mehmedinović his favorite living Bosnian writer, and Mehmedinović echoes Hemon’s work in its moments of playfulness, grace, and wonder as well as its blunt observations about the trauma of war and leaving one’s homeland. Few books are this good at capturing an immigrant’s sense of loss.
The struggle of memory against forgetting tracked through three intimate journeys ... Entering the increasingly crowded autofiction field, Mehmedinović examines the effort to remember—or more precisely, to not forget—our 'brief and unrepeatable time in this indescribably beautiful world.' ... Friends, often other writers, appear, but the focus here is family. Mehmedinović’s poetic side reveals itself via achingly beautiful imagery and recurring motifs. And he is a remarkably prescient observer of America ... A deeply personal and incisive look at memory, anchored by astute observations.
