The Audacity of Despair: An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon

Timothy Boswell, managing editor of Studies in the Novel, interviewed Aleksandar Hemon in Denton, Texas, on March 2, 2015. Hemon is the author of three novels—Nowhere Man (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Lazarus Project (2008), a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; and the just-published The Making of Zombie Wars (2015)—as well as two collections of short stories (The Question of Bruno [2000], Love and Obstacles [2009]) and a collection of essays (The Book of My Lives [2013]). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004, and a PEN/W.G. Sebald Award in 2011.

Hemon left his native Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, planning to stay for a matter of months. After the outbreak of war in Bosnia, he was unable to return home and remained in the United States, where he studied English while working such jobs as a Greenpeace canvasser, bike messenger, and ESL teacher. He published his first story in English in Triquarterly in 1995. His work, which is often compared to that of Vladimir Nabokov, now appears frequently in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and he writes in Bosnian for the web portal Radio Sarajevo.

Hemon’s books thus far have all dealt in some way with the Yugoslav wars, Bosnia, or Chicago, and they blur the lines of genre and the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction—as he points out, there is no such distinction in Bosnian literature. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters.

STUDIES IN THE NOVEL:

First, I wanted to note that 2015 is an anniversary for you in that this year marks two decades that you’ve been writing stories in English, and with greater mastery and nuance than many who experience it as a first language. How would you describe your interaction with the language, and has that relationship changed for you over the past twenty years?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:

I guess I am now, and have been for a while, fully bilingual. My brain operates in both languages—sometimes simultaneously, but sometimes I just switch from one to another. I write in both languages. I do not need to translate from one to another as I write. It’s much harder to translate than to actually write everything all over again in a different language. I guess I’m fully bilingual, pathologically bilingual, and this also means—at least in terms of literature, but probably well beyond that—I’m bicultural. That does not mean that the languages are strictly segregated. I don’t mix them when I speak, or when I write, but there’s an overlapping aspect to their simultaneous presence in my brain; there’s a part of my mind where the languages and cultures overlap. So that is a different state of mind from being simply bilingual. Though I can’t imagine who can be simply bilingual. I suppose people who do not operate and live in both languages but are, say, fluent in French and can turn it on when they do their work and read. But anyway—I’m bilingual, and there’s this particular state of mind in which multilingual people, by way of the languages they operate in, have access simultaneously to more than one culture. That is a privileged situation for me. It does not torment me. I have twice as much of everything that one needs from language as I would with one language.

STUDIES IN THE NOVEL:

For writers such as yourself who do occupy this overlapping space created by multiple languages and multiple cultures—and the list of contemporary writers who occupy similar spaces is fairly long, as we live in an increasingly mobile and multicultural world—what would you say are the particular challenges or opportunities inherent to this space that is created by these overlapping and intersecting languages and cultures?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:

I think one of the dangers is that people who are...