Aleksandar Hemon’s literary profession has been nothing if not numerous, with works that vary from the comedian novel The Making of Zombie Wars to his acclaimed The Lazarus Project, from collections of essays and tales to his collaboration with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell on the script for The Matrix Resurrections. The World and All That It Holds launches him but once more into new territory, as his formidable, elegantly wrought novel melds two love tales that play out amid the devastating world conflicts of the primary half of the twentieth century.
Rafael Pinto, a poetry-writing Bosnian Jew with a weak spot for opiates, witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his spouse simply outdoors his Sarajevo apothecary store in August 1914. Shortly afterward, Rafael finds himself conscripted into the military of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and preventing within the bloody trenches of World War I, the place “nothing happened all the time, and also very slowly.” Rafael falls in love with Osman, one other Sarajevan member of his unit, a Muslim man and gifted storyteller with “a knack for fixing problems.”
Rafael’s entanglement within the brutal, pointless battle is simply the start of an odyssey that takes him from Europe’s battlefields to the Asian wilderness and on foot throughout the Chinese desert, then to Shanghai the place he experiences life as a refugee within the interval that extends from just a few years previous the Japanese invasion of 1937 to the Communist takeover in 1949. For most of that journey, he’s accompanied by Osman’s daughter, Rahela, after Osman disappears. But even after Osman’s bodily presence is gone, his bond with Rafael is the supply of a sustaining energy inside this harsh new life, one which slowly deepens Rafael’s affection for Rahela.
The World and All That It Holds largely follows the views of Rafael and Rahela, with occasional detours into the memoirs of colourful British spy Edgar Moser-Ethering, who turns into a ubiquitous presence in Rafael’s life.
Hemon’s means to pack such an epic narrative into 352 pages is spectacular. Across all its settings, the story is enriched by the buildup of intently noticed particulars. Vivid motion sequences are neatly balanced with scenes exploring the characters’ inside lives. Although the story isn’t overtly non secular, Hemon alludes regularly to the biblical account of the Tower of Babel and God’s resolution to “confound their speech, so that nobody shall understand,” in addition to the Samsara wheel, the image of reincarnation in Buddhism and Hinduism. “Just love each other whatever the world you think you might be in,” a personality tells Rafael and Osman. The energy of love to provide that means to life, even within the worst of circumstances, suffuses this quietly passionate story.
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