... a collection of thorned, blood-red roses that make beauty out of [Hemon's] broken past ... The final essay — concerning his daughter's brain tumor and the many operations and transfusions that led up to her death — is the most compelling. In fact, it's one of the most moving pieces I have ever read. What could have been dangerously sentimental is instead a brutal meditation on life and suffering. I usually think of myself as emotionally shielded. I rarely allow myself to cry, but this essay slashed through my defenses. I chafed my eyes roughing away so many tears ... You should read Aleksandar Hemon's memoir for the same reason you should read his fiction: He is not only a remarkably talented writer but also one of the great social observers, a cultural anthropologist who seems at home everywhere and nowhere and who balances despair with hope, anger with humor.
Such is Aleksandar Hemon's bountiful gift for language that the Bosnian-American writer has drawn comparison with Nabokov, that genius of word selection ... it's a sensibility – at once mordant and exuberant, comic and subtle – that Hemon traces to a distinctive Slavic outlook ... a thoughtfully humorous and profoundly sad memoir-cum-collection of essays ... Hemon does with Sarajevo what Orhan Pamuk has done for Istanbul, which is to say he brings to life a city in ways that have little to do with its received image ... [Hemon's] beautifully assembled vignettes are often digressive but they invariably come back to a particular point and it's usually not the point that you were expecting. Because Hemon, who witnessed the wilful ruination of his famously civilised hometown, knows that life doesn't proceed in straight narrative lines ... a writer who knows how to make words succeed in the most unpromising places.
... elicits admiration and joy ... Am I churlish or unreasonable to say The Aquarium is one of the weakest pieces, that it pales in comparison to a book of sharper and more controlled essays, all loaded with heavy and significant, but also wry and rich, allusions? They feature distance and intelligence about old times made new with the keenest of lenses. We’ve all seen horror. Maybe Hemon’s seen more, but what makes him special is that he often knows how to make it mean something. And for the most part, he’s allowed himself the time to let raw emotions mellow into something stronger ... Whatever happens next, to any of us, I trust Hemon will continue seeking the right words, watching and waiting, and will remain among the most insightful voices of our time.
... wrenching but often very funny and self-deprecating too ... loving, humorous accounts of family, friends and pets have the potential to expand our compassion towards the strangers who live among us ... Hemon is interested in the ways that we use narrative and language to negotiate trauma ... extraordinary.
... a non-fiction pendant to the novels and short stories, but it is as artfully constructed and as emotionally devastating as [Hemon's] fictional oeuvre ... There is a profound humanism in Hemon’s work, which, on occasion, just skirts above sentimentality ... The Aquarium, is perhaps one of the most compelling pieces of non-fiction I have ever read – and I don’t mind saying that I had a lump in my throat throughout it ... a wonderful collection, and the earlier descriptions of literary shenanigans and family borscht soften the reader up for the climactic blow of the final essay. Our lives, Hemon seems to say, are stories we are constantly retelling: except, tragically, when they’re not.
Hemon chronicles with defining intensity, rueful self-critique, and piquant humor indelible revelations personal, cultural, and political ... incisive, masterfully crafted, and complexly affecting family stories ... Hemon writes with deft force, piercing observation, and commanding candor about the individual’s place within life’s web and the horrors and beauty of the human condition.
... a nuanced picture of Hemon’s life emerges, yet it is not the singular, master narrative imposed by the standard memoir format ... The force of Hemon’s writing is undeniable, and several of these pieces are exceptional; yet the collection is at times ungainly, with instances of repetition that give it a restless quality, a sense, if read straight through, of pacing in concentric circles around the book’s core subjects. This is not entirely for the bad: it’s interesting to see Hemon working and re-working his material, approaching the material of his experience from varying angles (much as he’s done in his fiction), and seeking narrative arcs in that material. This may be an unintended consequence of grouping pieces which were written separately and as stand-alone essays, but the effect is also an honest message about how we tell ourselves the stories of ourselves, revising and reflecting as we go along ... His recollections open up a world unfamiliar to many Americans, and make Sarajevo a vividly complex and compelling place ... His styling has the immigrant’s studied hyper-awareness of how the language works, and, at times, an inflected cadence that is beautifully unusual ... Hemon examines the ordinary and profound truths of family life and shines an inquiring light on his own interior life, all amid political upheaval and exceptional historical circumstances. Readers of Hemon’s fiction may find some of the terrain covered here familiar in its fundamentals, echoing material found in his stories and novels. The thrill of discovery, then, is in smaller moments, a continuation and deepening of what we’ve come to admire in this author’s writing ... These are pieces crafted to stand alone, some more enduring than others. Now, collected in this memorable volume, they still stand as distinct aspects of a vista, each an integral but independent part of the scene—perhaps a fitting metaphor for the imperfect narrative bent of memory itself.
As with his fiction, the essays here—though originally written as freestanding pieces—work together as a set of interlocking stories. In his careful, occasionally idiosyncratic prose, Hemon works his familiar theme of displacement, as experienced by those whom the forces of history (or, in the tragic final story, of biology) have yanked out of their old lives ... They give a vivid sense both of the texture of the two cities and of the pain, and eventual joy, Hemon felt in abandoning one for the other ... By turns sardonic and forlorn, Hemon’s tales illustrate the absurdity of war (the story of a beloved professor who became a genocidal nationalist is especially chilling), the enigma of arrival and the tragedy of finding your most cherished plans crushed by an onslaught of inhuman forces.
What’s remarkable about so many of these reminiscences is how ordinary most of them really are. Of course they are coloured by cultural differences, but early family and childhood life, the development of friendships, the testing of these against the realities of getting along in the world, adolescence and the discovery of the opposite sex, inundation in American pop culture, youthful rebellion against the existing status quo, early and embarrassing attempts to form an individual voice, surely all of these can be said to be our common experience ... The Aquarium is not an ending to the book in the manner of endings that we look for in novels. It’s not a summing up or a clear conclusion. It is a recognition that where he stands now is just as much a transitional point as the sufferings of his adolescence and the trials of being displaced, and torn from his family. Yet it does give him a sense of standing on somewhat firmer ground — a sense that, while always we strive for success and safety, life is never like that, it remains always equivocal, forever unpredictable.
Hemon can amuse and he can devastate. That he does both in his second language, wielded with precision and elegance, has earned him comparisons to Nabokov and Joseph Conrad ... Sometimes sketchy, characteristically idiosyncratic and sardonic, nearly always engaging, [the essays] constitute an impressionistic overview of Hemon's lives in both his native Sarajevo and his adopted city of Chicago ... Admirers of Hemon's fiction will welcome the avowed factuality of The Book of My Lives for the additional insight it offers into the author's backstory and motivations ... Hemon invites readers to savor both his émigré triumphs and his émigré pain — an invitation worth seizing.
Hemon manages to write about his own younger days in a way that makes them both uniquely his own, but also universal ... The essays, written for a series of different publications, can sometimes shift tonally. Early essays about Hemon's gang of childhood friends are so lighthearted as to be almost a little frivolous. Hemon’s amusement at his own childhood might be a little greater than the reader’s. Fans of Hemon familiar with past work like the heartbreaking The Lazarus Project might be a little surprised to see how much of a teddy bear the author appears to be in real life. This isn’t to say he skirts serious topics. An essay about his love of and lack of skill in chess touches on fatherhood, both in his relationship with his own father and through the story of one of his chess companions, whose son was shot in the street during the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. Yet overall the tone of the book is not one of pessimism or despair. Despite a life that has seen his family displaced and his childhood home ravaged nearly beyond repair, Hemon seems to remain mostly good-humored ... the relationship between Hemon and his adopted home is a romance.
[Hemon] dredges his Eastern European roots for remarkable stories that feel universal despite being indelibly marked by the Soviet experience ... this prose has an unfinished quality that makes it come bounding at you like a basketball, but perhaps a little too often the language here is strained ... Hemon's strengths are storytelling, description and humor, but when he attempts to force conclusions, these essays flounder. It is unfortunate that the collection opens with one such pedantic piece on the difficulties of assimilation ... Readers should persist, however, for subsequent essays largely avoid such overdetermined, prolix writing in favor of playful, intricate anecdotes that show Hemon's strengths ... All in all, The Book of My Lives is a worthy collection. These essays, all but one previously published, cohere well and offer a satisfying composite of the man behind the books. But they're nonetheless outshone by Hemon's novels and stories - enjoyable and stimulating, they don't always fulfill the promise of their subject matter but do whet the appetite for Hemon's next novel.
Hemon turned the bad cards dealt him by history into a winning hand: his English is unencumbered by the weight of tired, automatic associations and has the capacity to refresh the referential relation between things and the words we use to describe them. There is crispness to Hemon’s sentences ... Perhaps it is because so many of these essays are about fragmentation – personal, familial, social, national – that Hemon has decided to leave them in discontinuous relation to each other. Perhaps it is down to his publicly acknowledged 'hatred' for the manipulative tidying-up of 'confessional memoirs.' Still, the way these essays are collected is frustrating. All but one of them have been published somewhere else and they have not been reworked with enough care. The tone fluctuates from essay to essay and frequently you are told something as if for the first time having read it only a few pages previously. It is precisely because Hemon is such a fine writer that these repetitions flare off the page.
Hemon writes with the confidence and fluidity that make a great storyteller, so it’s something of a shame that the overall collection feels fragmented, with sections that leap dramatically off the page and others that lie flat ... the flaws lie in the sections that feel surplus to the book’s requirements. A lengthy piece on his childhood interest in chess feels like filler and is neither particularly interesting nor engaging, certainly not when placed between the turbulent times described in the earlier chapters and the tragedy that lies, most unexpectedly, in the closing pages. (Its placement in the book is, in fact, utterly confusing) ... not a rage-fuelled book, it is simply a disjointed one, with individual pieces that might very likely have worked well in their original journalistic publications but which hang uncomfortably together in book form and ultimately lack the depth or profundity that the author’s reputation would lead readers to expect.
[Hemon] maintains an appealing, self-deprecating voice throughout these early chapters, readily recognizing his own delusions and youthful arrogance ... Hemon’s technique is not conventional—this is no linear boyhood-to-manhood narrative. The chapters, in fact, could in many ways stand alone. But their cumulative emotional power—accelerated by a wrenching final section about the grievous illness of his younger daughter—eventually all but overwhelms ... Amuses, informs and inspires—then, finally, rips open the heart.
... the book has the feel of a patchwork memoir that focuses on defining and enlightening moments in the author’s life rather than his existence as a whole ... As he goes on to focus on his adopted hometown, the immigrants he plays soccer with, the chess players at his local cafe, and his past and present lovers, the themes and writing become more personal, emotional, and dynamic. The book culminates with The Aquarium, 28 heart-wrenching pages of powerful prose originally published in the New Yorker, about his infant daughter’s battle with cancer that is nothing short of a tour de force; its terrible beauty demonstrates Hemon’s transformation as a writer and a man.
