Of the two halves, My Parents is the more conventionally straightforward ... Like Hemon’s fiction, the real-life stories in My Parents are so exquisitely constructed that their scaffolding is invisible. You get the sense that he is trying to understand his parents in a way that his younger self did not ... My Parents is warm, wry and loving — but because this is Hemon, he shows his affection not through sentimental declarations but by paying close attention to specifics ... This Does Not Belong to You is rawer and stranger, focused more on Hemon than his parents, though the two halves of the book work in tandem ... In My Parents, Hemon depicts himself as a gentle boy ... In This Does Not Belong to You he is a junior sadist ... There’s a fatalism that suffuses This Does Not Belong to You, an overwhelming sense of mortality and the suspicion that storytelling might never be enough. This despair is leavened by what Hemon so beautifully and concretely conveys in My Parents, with Hemon as a middle-aged son who is carefully and movingly trying to make sense of it all.
[A] gorgeous new dual memoir ... The writing contains both immediacy and a thrillingly historical long view ... The stories Hemon tells about his parents and their histories are by turns harrowing and hilarious ... There is all the love and frustration here that anyone feels for their aging parents, with the additional heft of sympathy for their pain ... While My Parents unrolls in great skeins of storytelling, its companion book, This Does Not Belong to You, is a series of short, spikier pieces, untitled, none longer than a single paragraph ... This is some of the best writing about what it really feels like to be a child that I can recall reading.
In this moving memoir, Hemon approaches the general through the particular, capturing the refugee experience of displacement through writing about his Bosnian family ... My Parents is not all grim. The chapter on food will not only have you heading to the kitchen, but laughing out loud. Describing his parents uncomfortably eating at a restaurant, Hemon gets on a roll like he’s doing stand-up ... When you finish My Parents, you flip the book over and start This Does Not Belong to You, a separate collection of isolated memories, musings and anecdotes. This is Hemon at his most contemplative, whimsical, and personal ... This Does Not Belong to You is Hemon looking deeply into himself, mining the recesses of his mind, and while he doesn’t always strike gold, it is, like My Parents, a joy to join in the reflection.
...it is only in two new books of nonfiction—My Parents: An Introduction and This Does Not Belong to You—that he really comes to terms with the limits of individual agency, and the grim prospect that there may be no salvation for the exile after all ... the two books meet, like hemispheres, in the middle. Together, they constitute the poles of Hemon’s world: history and memoir, reality and myth, realism and the avant-garde ... As a writer, Hemon is exact, unsentimental, cerebral. That is not to suggest that he is aloof or unfeeling ... There is an ocean of pain underneath his prose, and his brainy stoicism is the raft that prevents him from drowning in it ... This Does Not Belong to You represents a step forward in Hemon’s relationship with the written word. Or maybe it’s a step back. The confidence of his earlier work has now been checked by a pervasive doubt—about literature’s ability to create order and meaning, and to put a broken life back together ... Hemon’s crisis in This Does Not Belong to You also undermines the writer’s greatest conceit: that by describing the world truthfully he can somehow control it ... We know, in our bones, that control is an illusion ... Great literature still provides its comforts.
One of Hemon’s calling cards is formal experimentation. The new project joins two discrete but complementary works of nonfiction. This Does Not Belong to You is essentially a series of outtakes from the family memoir — short prose pieces and prose poems leavened by philosophical musings. They evoke a childhood filled with mischief and casual schoolyard violence, as well as scholastic success and the heartbreak of first love. Occasionally, Hemon will draw harsh lessons from these piecemeal recollections...But mostly he wants to validate memory as an antidote to both exile and mortality — even if memory itself is necessarily faulty. '(W)hat I remember now are the stories of memories that might have been the memories of stories,' he says, a warning, once again, not to follow him too far into the labyrinth.
It isn’t a criticism to say that [Hemon's] latest publication, a kind of bipartite memoir or autobiographical diptych, is a broken book. Dispersion, diffusion, disjointedness, decentralisation — these have always been both themes and characteristics of Hemon’s writing. The back-cover text suggests readers start with My Parents: An Introduction, a tender, unshowy, patient telling of Hemon’s parents’ flight to Canada and the unfolding of their new lives ... This Does Not Belong to You, the second book, comprises 86 more-or-less oblique scenes from Hemon’s prewar life...painted with Hemon’s eye for the tellingly uncanny or grotesque ... My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You sometimes feels strained. Its halves repel one another. But even if it reads more like an abridgment of the greater book than a new chapter, there are few living authors who illuminate so heartbreakingly the wormholes between present and past, or who are so merciless in recovering the symbol-saturated, eerily lit land that is childhood.
Depending on how you read this two-part book by Aleksandar Hemon, you’ll either be going from a concrete account to disarray, or watching the threads of memory come together into a single story ... I started with My Parents, a sensitive and absorbing account of the author’s mother and father from their life in Sarajevo through their move to Canada during the Bosnian war. Hemon creates thoughtful portraits of his parents ... This Does Not Belong to You, the book’s other volume, is arranged like a scrapbook. In short vignettes about his childhood, Hemon probes his memories and his ability to reliably relay them ...Sometimes I had the impression that the ideas on the page were still forming, finding their way into thought. But in its contradictory nature, its lack of interest in settling on a single form or account, the book prevents the creation of a narrative that could be used by someone else. In a world that demands of every migrant a story that justifies his or her arrival, Hemon’s book keeps these memories within his own private language, for his purposes alone.
The expository nature of Hemon’s approach to writing can be frustrating. Often, important moments are brushed over via quick narration, with little to no attention given to setting scenes ... Hemon’s work signifies a change from biographies anchored in the past to those concerned with offering a contemporary perspective. My Parents is a project that embraces point of view to show just how much people like Robert Shields had it all wrong. The past isn’t about what transpired when. It’s about remembering how people were.
My Parents: An Introduction is filled with astute ruminations on the older Hemons’ way of life in Bosnia and in exile, including the central place of food, literature, and music ... The book is replete with Hemon’s mordant humor and one feels the pleasure he takes in the incongruous and out-of-place ... There are parts of this section of the book [This Does Not Belong to You] that are somewhat wearisome, specifically certain attempts at paradox and profundity ... Elsewhere, his musings on memory are far more convincing ... scraps of memory do belong to everyone, and sickeningly so as a person grows older and finds it harder and harder to bear the mystery of how the vanished realms of the past and its people can endure so inaccessibly and tormentingly in the mind. That, in essence, is what this strange book is about.
... witty, mournful ... darkly funny ... Ultimately, [Hemon] chooses to be an optimist, at least of a Hemon-ish sort. In Bosnia’s past, he sees America’s future ... pay[s] tribute to the struggle.
The association of Hemon with Nabokov...is misleading; given Hemon’s roughhewn prose and late blooming affair with the English language, he has more in common with Joseph Conrad...who, like Hemon, brought a decidedly non-English sensibility to the literature of his adopted country ... My Parents: An Introduction and This Does Not Belong to You provide the context to Hemon’s remarkable body of work ... Hemon’s books are as laced with American (and British) pop culture references as a Murakami novel: Raymond Chandler, Sonic Youth, Miles Davis, Sinatra ... When you finish reading My Parents, you can flip the book upside down, literally, for Hemon’s childhood memoirs. If the Nabokov-Hemon comparison is legitimate (and I promise not to bring it up again), This Does Not Belong to You would be Hemon’s version of Nabokov’s great autobiography, Speak, Memory...Hemon’s memoir is so much more than random recollection. It’s an essay on the nature of memory itself.
Inherent in Hemon’s repeated reimagining of his own odyssey and his desire to recall Sarajevo before the war is the question: what did peace even feel like? In two new memoirs published in one volume, Hemon attempts a nostalgic answer ... The short, dense passages [of the second section] never feel arbitrary. He is able to recreate the process of recovering memories on the page. War seems like an impossibility, and we inhabit what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a paternalistic regime, where everything seemed fully established ... In lovely, languorous sentences, Hemon passes over nothing, and records the inner wars of his previous life.
Hemon’s newest, most delving nonfiction work ... He also incorporates the complicated histories of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, studded with cultural touchstones, in his ardently precise and analytical portraits of his parents, while in This Does Not Belong to You, he deepens the art of the vignette with sensuous and emotional veracity as he shares scorching moments from his Sarajevo childhood ... Here, too, are bracing candor, gruff tenderness, righteous anger, and political astuteness, all conveyed with Hemon’s signature intensity, mordant wit, and creative bite.
This Does Not Belong to You is more of a series of coming-of-age fragments, some rapturously poetic ... It provides the seeds for his sense of identity and for his germination as a writer ... An incisive combination of literature that addresses the function of literature and memories that explore the meaning of memory.
[A] richly reflective two-volume memoir ... Hemon sets the tender and often funny story of his quirky parents against the vivid background of their nurturing (though dour and sexist) peasant culture ... Sometimes lively and sensual, sometimes bleakly ruminative, Hemon’s recollections unite his dazzling prose style with a captivating personal narrative.
