The World and All That It Holds

Written" by Bosnian-American writer Aleksander Hemon, this is fascinating novel that lives up to its title. Covering the period from just before the start of the First World War in 1914 to just before the Communist takeover of China in 1949, with an epilogue set in Jerusalem in 2001 just a few days before the 9/11 attack in the USA, the novel combines history with realist fiction and magical realism. It is also one of the most multi-layered novels I have read in a while.It begins in Sarajevo with the assassination that leads to the First World War and a developing love affair between two men, one of whom (Pinto) is a Bosnian Jew, the other (Osman) being a Bosnian Muslim. Already we are in unusual territory: a gay love affair in a war-torn world between two people whose communities have at times been in conflict (and continue to be so today in Israel/Palestine). The novel also takes in the Russian revolution, the Japanese invasion of China, the second world war, the Chinese Communist revolution and various sectarian and national conflicts in central Asia. Osman also fathers a child with a young woman who dies shortly after giving birth, by which time Osman has disappeared and is assumed to have been killed in one of the wars taking place, so Pinto becomes the adoptive father of the child, Rahela, as they continue their travels, sometimes guided by the spirit of Osman, though whether Osman's appearances are due to Pinto's opium addiction or not is up to the reader to decide.This is a novel of epic proportions that explores whether love can survive in a world torn apart by war and hate. And it is one whose main characters will live with me. It is a novel I will certainly return to again.

Just awful.

Like others who have posted, I am in awe of the brilliance of Hemon's writing but his use of untranslated phrases makes this a very difficult and slow read at times. What am I missing? Is this essential? Can I skip it and hope I get the meaning from the context? Or must I drop everything and immediately go to Google Translate? Assuming Hemon is writing in a language Google can identify and translate!I'm somewhat multilingual, but it's not always clear what the languages are and I am SURE that Google doesn't do Spanjol! (Some of the phrases in Spanjol I understand but others are very obscure. Spanjol is a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in the Balkans that developed in Ottoman times. It's basically medieval Spanish with many loan words from Hebrew, Turkish, and southern Slavic languages.) Just trying to guess which southern Slavic language Hemon favors is a puzzle. Is it Serbian? Croatian? Bosnian? One of the others? Then there is Turkish, not one of the languages most English-speakers are familiar with. Assuming it IS Turkish. Could it be a word from one of the other Turkic languages that dominate Central Asia? Is it Uzbek? HELP!!!Please, Alex, in your next work continue to dazzle us with your linguistic range, but give us lesser mortals some hints and clues, or just translate what you're saying directly, so we can savor the flavor of the original thought but still get the jist of what you're trying to tell us!

This is a gorgeous, devastating, confounding, brilliant book. Many reviewers here and elsewhere make note of the author's penchant for scattering various untranslated passages, songs and poems throughout the novel. Like many, at first I found this puzzling and frustrating: at one point I asked Google to translate a passage only to be told that Croatian wasn't one of the languages translated by Google Translate! But the book is so engrossing, so compelling it never occurred to me to stop reading. And then I realized that my confusion--exasperation at times---put me, in a minor but crucial way, in the same position Hemon's characters find themselves in: refugees with no guide, no translator, no compass. And so, like them, I kept going. I hope other readers will too.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book.Took me to places I've rarely read about and never visited. The use of Hebrew and Croat takes a bit of getting used to but is often amusing. A great story of love and war.