Aleksandar Hemon / Features / Untitled Books

'Temperamentally, I’m not a journalist; I like to embellish, I like to talk about myself and I'm lazy.'

Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon's dazzling new novel is all the more remarkable for being written in his second language. Born in Bosnia and now based in the States, questions of identity and belonging sit at the heart of his writing. He talks to Viola Fort.

'Its not just the case in America, but here as well, that the national identity is often defined against the presence of foreigners, the dangerous presence of foreigners.'

Aleksandar Hemon looks a little bleary this morning. He sits, legs outstretched, on a sofa he manages to make look almost Lilliputian under his broad frame. He has the build of a rugby player, though football is his sport of choice, and his hair is shaved close to his scalp. He wears what looks like a late night on his face which he rubs frequently as he talks. A pair of severe, rectangular spectacles - the kind trendy architects favour - flip frequently from their perch on his nose, to the top of his head, and back again. His voice is strongly accented; Bosnian edged with an American twang. He is at times more than a little gruff, but dissolves just as quickly into gentleness, amusement and animated interest. The overall impression is of a large bear fresh out of hibernation.

Hemon's new book The Lazarus Project has just been published in this country to great acclaim. Much has been made of his linguistic dexterity, for although he spoke English before he left Bosnia, it was 'tourist English'; fine for getting by with but not for writing novels in. It is his third book, and was six years in the writing, although his second, Nowhere Man, was written simultaneously, along with a number of short stories. He explains this as impatience, "I have journalistic instincts; I like to write something today and see it published next week." There is certainly an urgency about him, despite this morning's weary drawl.

Hemon's two nationalities and his experience as an immigrant are central to his fiction and to his approach to the world. He was born in 1964 to an accountant mother and engineer father, and grew up in Sarajevo where he gained a degree in English. He worked as a journalist, first at a radio station, reading on air, and then for a magazine writing for the culture pages. "My first public text was an article on Nick Cave," he remembers, amused, but insists, "Temperamentally, I'm not a journalist; I like to embellish, I like to talk about myself, and I'm lazy." While he has only ever published fiction written in English, he started to write poems and stories in his native language while still in Bosnia. By his own admission they were bad, "really bad." Was this lack of experience, or something to do with the language? He answers, "I was young, you know... I wrote for a long time before I wrote anything that I actually liked. There was a whole poetry writing phase of about three years in which I wrote about a thousand poems, which really comes down to a poem a day. But they were just awful, one after another, each worse than the last." He laughs, wincing at the memory. "The titles were good though, even though they weren't related to the content." Like what? "Oh, I don't know... Peter Pan and the Lesbians." That's a joke, I think, but he has reused one of those titles, Love and Obstacles, for a forthcoming collection of stories.

In 1992, the 28 year-old Hemon was invited on a cultural exchange organised by the American Cultural Centre. "It was a program which invited young journalists to the United States and showed them... stuff. So I went on this trip and I stayed over for another month or two to see some friends in Canada and in Chicago." Just as he was about to return home, war broke out in Bosnia. He was in Chicago as the siege of Sarajevo took hold, and made the decision to settle there. "I arrived in Chicago in mid-March, and my return ticket was for May 1st, and in those weeks I decided I would not return." He taught himself 'native' English by reading Nabokov and writing lists of the words he didn't understand. Within six months the language had settled in him, right to the marrow.

Hemon is a supremely talented stylist with a lexicographer's ear for the unusual and under-used. Reading his books one finds oneself noting down words, for the sheer delight of the language; gibbous, caroming, calenture, piceous, maculate, incalescent. Still more delicious is his visual cunning with simile; as Lazarus crosses the street, "An enormous automobile, panting like an aroused bull, nearly runs the young man over." A casino bouncer is "a bison-necked beast, apparently hiding hams in the sleeves of his faux-Armani suit." That Hemon can be so nimble in a second, recently mastered language is amazing. Though comparisons with Nabokov inevitably, and deservedly, abound, it is worth remembering that Nabokov had an English nanny, was read Dickens as a child and studied at Cambridge.

Language is often written of in Hemon's books. His concern is "the magic of converting language in to a sensual experience," and in The Lazarus Project he frequently plays with the semantics of communication between characters and the spaces between languages:

One morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

"One of the things I always want to achieve is a presence of language, so you can hear its music," he says.

Perhaps writing in a new language attuned his ear to the value of words and their individual currency, rather than using words as a means to get from one end of a sentence to the other, as one tends to in one's own language, unthinkingly. "I think that to be able to write in any language, it has to be part of your subconscious mind, and in your native language that's what happens. But it is also connected in your head to all kinds of emotional and intellectual and associative content, because its part of your wiring. And for me to be able write in English at all, it had to enter my subconscious mind, which for some reason, somehow, happened in the early nineties. I remember, and it still fascinates me - I would like to talk to a psycholinguist, maybe he or she would be able to explain to me how it works - I remember dreaming in English and noticing that people who were speaking English in my dream should not be speaking English." He also found that his childhood memories started to come to him in English. "I would remember things that had happened to me in my childhood, but you know, we did not have conversations in English, they had not happened; I was translating my memories. But not consciously, they would just come to me in English." He is amazed as anyone that another language can take root so quickly, and penetrate to the deeper reaches of his subconscious. "Somehow this happened to me with English, and I don't know why or how. I had no precedent, nobody told me that this could happen"

Hemon writes of the immigrant experience twice over in The Lazarus Project; the short life and death of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant to the US in 1908; and the Bosnian writer Vladimir Brik, who is un-settled in Chicago, married to an American and researching Averbuch's story for a book. While Brik is Hemon's creation, Averbuch once lived and breathed. The details of his life are scant, and would have been forgotten entirely were it not for the circumstances of his death: the nineteen-year-old, who had recently arrived in Chicago from the Ukraine and lived with his sister Olga, was shot dead by the Chief of Police George Shippy when he tried to deliver a letter to Shippy's door. Lazarus was, Shippy claimed, a hostile and dangerous anarchist who had arrived on his doorstep intent on assassinating him.

Hemon came across Averbuch's story when he was given a small book called The Accidental Anarchist written by Walter Roth and Joe Krauss. In among the facts of the case were photos taken at the time; incredible, eerily atmospheric photos of poor dead Averbuch seated upright in a chair, his head held aloft by the policeman behind him. It was the photographs that gave Hemon the ultimate push to take up the story; "Not only did I realize I wanted to write a book on Averbuch, but also that I wanted to find a way to include the photos. The photos of the dead Averbuch were just amazing, are amazing." The photographs are published with the book, along with a series taken by his friend Velibor Bo�ovic, at the start of each chapter.

The book is like a series of Russian matryoshka dolls; there's Hemon writing about Brik writing about Averbuch, each present at the heart of the next. "I'm the big doll," he says, amused. It is hard at times to work out where Hemon ends and Brik begins. In the story, Brik receives a grant from the Glory Foundation to research his book; Hemon was a recipient of a grant from the McArthur foundation, commonly known as a 'Genius award.' Brik and his photographer friend Rora travel to Eastern Europe to trace Averbuch's story; Hemon and Bo�ovic made the same trip, and the resulting photographs are interspersed between the 'real' photographs from the Chicago archive in the book. Brik displays the same mixture of love and rage for his adopted country as Hemon, the same refusal to represent a demographic and the same suspicion of nationalism. "Its not just the case in America, but here as well, that the national identity is often defined against the presence of foreigners, the dangerous presence of foreigners."

James Wood wrote recently in the New Yorker that The Lazarus Project was "A 9/11 novel pretending not to be one." Hemon never mentions 9/11 directly, but the suspicion extended to foreigners in the wake of the attacks, and the assumed sovereignty and 'rightness' of the countries holding the balance of power all reverberate through the book. Hemon, quite rightly, refuses to be so neatly pigeonholed ("I don't know what a 9/11 book is. To my mind, a 9/11 novel speaks of self indulgent victimhood"), but Wood is right, he deftly captures something of the broader context of the 'war on terror', and its precisely because he does not directly address events that he offers a revealing commentary on America's reaction to the attacks and all that ensued. The Lazarus Project quietly seethes with political anger. "To me, this is an Abu Ghraib novel if anything: its Abu Ghraib and the war on terror. 9/11 is alluded to at some points, but there are so many 9/11 stories. I want to talk about Abu Ghraib." Brik has an argument over the Abu Ghraib pictures that reveals much about their relationship, and much beyond it: "The gist of it was what she saw were essentially decent American kids acting upon a misguided belief they were protecting freedom, their good intentions going astray. What I saw was young Americans expressing their unlimited joy of the unlimited power over someone else's life and death."

Hemon refuses to provide a comment on the Bosnian situation, despite the expectations of some. "I would not want to represent Bosnians to an English speaking audience. I have no right, nothing in my life entitles me to that." It's not simply a question of qualification, but of academic principle; "I object to literature that presents itself as being able to capture the soul of a nation. There's this mode of reading in the States where people feel they can buy culture chiefly by buying the book; Read The Kite Runner, and that's Afghanistan. I object to that. I like the fact that my books contain no explanations or any set of guidance for the problems of the Balkans."

While the question of identity sits at the heart of Hemon's writing, it is not something he ever wishes to define. Identity is fluid, and the lines constantly blur, from page to page, book to book, and never more so than in the relationship between the author and his characters. People often look for him in his characters and assume any similarities must betoken autobiographical detail; "That happens to me all the time. People who write memoirs have to convince the audience - and they sometimes lie about it - that this really happened. Whereas I constantly have to tell people no, it didn't, I made it up." But he concedes, "Everything in my experience, in everyone's experience, is inscribed in the language that you use."

Friday, 5 September, 2008

In Interviews

More

Buy books

The Lazarus Project

Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.

Untitled Books

Issue 24 / August - September 2010

'Temperamentally, I’m not a journalist; I like to embellish, I like to talk about myself and I'm lazy.'